TV Show episodes Suddenly started "matching" to other shows

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.23.4.4805
Player Version#:

This issue started a couple of days ago and had been working fine before then. I have several Plex libraries set up that correspond to my users. For instance I have libraries named TV Shows-Chris, TV Shows-John, TV Shows-Mike etc…so if user Chris comes along and says that they want the show “Loki”, I add it to Sonarr to be downloaded for them, and the episodes ultimately go into the file folder D:\MEDIA\TV Shows-Chris\Loki\Season 1\ Plex scans and upon seeing this, updates the TV Shows-Chris library with the new episodes…now lets say user John comes along and says he would also like to see Loki. Since I know I already downloaded this for Chris, I simply go to the Plex library TV Shows-John, click on Manage Library–>Edit–>Add Folders, and I add the folder D:\MEDIA\TV Shows-Chris\Loki…now it shows up in John’s library and he’s able to watch it as well. This has been working fine for a long time and then all of the sudden a couple days ago, when I go to add this folder to John’s library, Loki does not appear in his library and it appears that nothing happens when it scans…upon closer inspection, I found that if I go inside of another TV Show in his library called “Servant” and look at Get Info on episode one, lo and behold, it shows two files…episode one of Servant, and episode one of Loki! I then picked another TV Show at random from TV Shows-Chris called “American Horror Stories(2021)” and added the folder to TV Shows-John…exact same thing happened except these episode files were added to the show iCarly(2021) show so that when you look at each episodes get info, they had two files…the one it was supposed to have, and then the corresponding episode for American Horror Stories(2021). Has anyone seen this kind of behavior before? I really appreciate your help!

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This won’t work for long, as you are directly adding the folder which contains the show’s title. Thus making it “invisible” to the scanner as now all it sees are the “season” folders.
Every show which is added to another library in this way is violating the file naming guide https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-tv-show-files/

The proper way to do this is to create symbolic links. Thus, the top level folder of the show will appear in the right place.
Plus, you won’t need to edit the library anymore. “Scan library files” will be sufficent.

There is a windows file explorer extension which makes creating these links more comfortable and which also makes them appear in a special style so you don’t confuse them with a “real” folder anymore.
https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

Or you could simply throw all your shows into one library. Then use “sharing labels” in Plex to selectively share a show with one or several users. https://support.plex.tv/articles/204232573-restricting-the-shares/

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Thank you for this! I didn’t even know these “sharing labels” existed! I would love to have just one library each for TV Shows and Movies and then have each one display only the shows that user has asked to see. Sounds like this will be much better! Thanks again!

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