How Shortlist decides things

Watched titles (and why one can still be recommended)

Shortlist excludes what someone has already watched. Each run reads every user’s complete watched set directly from your Plex server, as that user, with no extra configuration, no database mount, and it works for every account on the server.

The mechanism is the per-user server token Plex already mints for every share. When you share libraries with someone, plex.tv issues a server-scoped accessToken for their account (GET /api/servers/{machine}/shared_servers); reading library/sections/{key}/all?unwatched=0 with that token returns exactly the titles Plex considers watched for them, carrying their own viewCount (movies) and viewedLeafCount/leafCount (shows). The owner isn’t shared to their own server, so their set is read with the admin token; a managed Home profile with no share of its own is read by briefly switching to it and exchanging for a server token (the same path the privacy system uses).

This is what stops watched titles reappearing. Plex has two notions of “watched”: a playback session (something was streamed) and a mark-as-watched (ticked off, or a whole season marked, with no play). Plex’s playback-history API reports only the first, and only the most recent ~200 plays, so a heavy watcher’s older titles and everyone’s marks are missing from it. viewCount > 0 (what unwatched=0 filters on) counts both, at any depth — on one real server, all ~13k watched titles rather than the ~1k the history API returns.

What “already watched” means for a show

A movie is watched the moment it is played. A show has no such moment — Plex gives no show-level viewCount, only viewedLeafCount and leafCount — so every yes/no answer is a threshold over those two numbers, and which threshold depends on where recommendations.watched_pct sits:

“Finished”, used by the cap only, is viewedLeafCount against 80% of the episodes with a length-scaled floor (max(3, 15%)), so a long-running series someone is genuinely deep into isn’t treated as fresh while three episodes of a 200-episode run isn’t treated as finished.

Changed in 1.2. A 0% row used to exclude only finished shows, so one you were two episodes into was, to the row, a fresh discovery and could be recommended straight back. A live probe of a real server found ?type=2&unwatched=0 returning shows as little as 1.1% watched (2 of 176), and five of ten started shows there were still eligible. At 0%, started now means watched. Rows above 0% are unchanged. If you relied on the old behaviour, set the cap above 0.

A row that should LEAD with rewatches needs the per-row rewatch flag instead. unstarted_only still exists and still matters — but only on a row whose cap is above 0%, since a 0% row now drops started series anyway.

Watched vs finished

The dashboard reports both, and they are different questions. Watched is Plex’s own flag: a film played, or a series with at least one finished episode. Finished is a film played, or a series with every episode watched.

The gap is not a rounding error. On a real 47-user server, of the 158 show picks credited as watched, only 21 had actually been finished — 31 were a single episode. A single “watched” count therefore flatters television structurally, and a TV row will out-score a movie row on it without being any better. Both numbers are shown side by side so that comparison stops being misleading; lists are still SORTED by watched, because ranking on finished would bury every TV row under every movie row.

Three thresholds exist in Shortlist and they are deliberately not the same, because they answer different questions:

Plex publishes no show-level finished flag, so the last one is Shortlist’s own threshold — the strictest and least arguable of the options, and the same wording a person’s page already uses per title (“3 of 12 episodes” / “finished”).

Backfill. picks.finished_at was added in migration 0072. Films were backfilled exactly, since a film’s watched flag IS completion. Series were deliberately left empty and fill in going forward: which shows are past the bar today is knowable, but when they crossed it is not, and inventing that date would file old watches in the wrong week of the trend chart permanently. A series already credited as watched is picked up on the first sync after it completes.

Why a watched title can still appear: the read is per-run, so a title marked watched after the last run stays eligible until the next run re-reads. Between runs, Jobs → Sync history (POST /api/report/sync) re-reads every user’s watched set on demand. It writes nothing to Plex, only refreshes what Shortlist knows, so hit rates and the per-user “N titles watched” count stay current without waiting for a scheduled run.

Why you see everyone’s rows (and the watching account)

If you own the server, the Recommended shelf inside each library shows you every person’s row, not just yours. This is a Plex limitation with no setting behind it: rows are hidden from other people through the share each of them has with your server, and you have no share with yourself, so there is nothing for Plex to hide them behind. Your own Home screen is unaffected — Plex tracks “on the owner’s Home” separately from “on a friend’s Home”, so nobody else’s row lands there.

Users → You see everyone’s rows (/watching-account) lays out the three ways to deal with it:

1. Take the rows off the library shelf. Everyone still gets their row on their Home screen, and nobody — including you — sees anyone else’s. You lose the row inside Movies and TV Shows. One click; it flips placement_friends on every per-person row and leaves the Home half alone.
2. Leave it. Some owners genuinely don’t mind. Dismissing stops Shortlist mentioning it.
3. Move your watching to a separate account. Keep the library shelf and stop seeing everyone else’s rows. You create a Plex Home user (Plex → Settings → Home → Add user), share the same libraries with it, and Shortlist copies your watch history across so its picks are right from the first run.

The copy reads your account straight from Plex — per episode, including anything you are part-way through — and writes the same state onto the new account. It does not read Shortlist’s cache, so it works during the setup wizard before anything has been synced.

What “copies your watch history” means exactly

The new account ends up matching yours:

• Per episode, not per show. A series you are 400 episodes into arrives 400 episodes in, and no further. Marking the show itself would tell Plex “mark every episode”, and part-watched series are the common case rather than an edge — on a real account, 342 of 535 watched shows.
• Rewatch counts. A film you have seen three times arrives at three.
• Part-watched films and episodes. They land at the same position and show up in Continue Watching.
• It removes as well as adds. Anything watched on the target that you have not watched is un-marked. That is what makes it a replica rather than a merge — and it is what repairs an account an older version over-marked. The web UI previews the removals by title and requires them to be acknowledged before the real run.
• It is reversible — unless that account cannot see all of your libraries. The target’s complete state is snapshotted before the first write, and Undo restores it exactly, counts and positions included. If a library is unreadable for that account the snapshot cannot be complete, so the undo is refused rather than restoring from a partial picture; the preview says so before you agree.
• Your own account is never written to. The copy reads yours and writes only with the target account’s own token.

Afterwards Shortlist re-reads the target and reports what did not land, rather than reporting the writes it sent.

The date problem, and source_viewed_at

Plex cannot backdate a watch. Every write — /:/scrobble, /:/progress, /:/timeline — is stamped now, and no endpoint accepts a date. Copying two thousand titles onto a new account therefore tells Plex they were all watched today, and the next watch sync would write exactly that into watched_titles.viewed_at.

That matters more than it sounds: Shortlist picks seeds from the most recent watches, so a set where every row shares one timestamp orders arbitrarily and the new account’s recommendations become noise. The migration that gave someone their history back would be the one that broke their picks.

Three things keep the dates:

• watched_titles.source_viewed_at records the true date per cached title. The watch sync never overwrites it and never deletes a row carrying one, and every “how recently?” read prefers it. NULL — the value on every row Plex reported directly — means viewed_at is the truth, so nothing changes for anyone who never runs a transfer.
• Your play log is copied onto the new account’s watch_events with its original timestamps, per episode. Those rows carry source='transfer' and are deliberately excluded from pick attribution: they are real watches for recommendation purposes, but they are not that person pressing play on a Shortlist row. This is the only dated history the account gets — a scrobble writes no entry to Plex’s own history log.
• Writes go oldest first. The dates cannot be replicated, but the ORDER can, and lastViewedAt order is what Continue Watching and “recently watched” sort on. So the shelves come out right even though every date reads as today.

How a pick is chosen (and why a row can be short)

Every candidate carries an affinity: how strongly the source that produced it vouched for it, 0..1:

• TMDB sets it from which endpoint suggested the title and how near the top of that list it sat (/recommendations is worth more than /similar, and both decay down their list), multiplied by a genre-coherence factor: the share of the candidate’s own genres that the seed does not have. TMDB tags a medical drama simply “Drama” and so is nearly everything it suggests, so overlap alone discriminates nothing, but a suggestion also tagged “Sci-Fi & Fantasy” is measurably further away.
• Sources with no ranking of their own — tmdb_discover, trakt, llm_web — report the neutral 1.0. That means “no ranking information”, not “perfect match”; they are deliberate picks rather than the tail of a list, and pre_rank’s per-source round-robin is what keeps them competing fairly.

Ranking is (1 + seed_frequency) × rating × (1 + seed_weight) × affinity, so a well-rated but distant title no longer beats an obviously similar one.

A row is allowed to come up short. Padding a partly-filled row only draws from candidates at or above MIN_FILLER_AFFINITY (0.35). Four genuinely-similar titles beat ten where six are filler. When that happens the run log says so at INFO, naming the closest rejected title, so a short row reads as the filter working rather than as a failure.

Each delivered pick records its provenance (sources, affinity, returned by GET /api/users and the run detail) and the UI shows it under the title, as “suggested by TMDB · loosely related”. At DEBUG the run log prints the same per row: every pick with its seed, source and affinity.

How rows stay private

Each row is a Plex collection labelled shortlist_<userslug>. Every other account’s share filter gets a label!=shortlist_<userslug> exclusion (merged into their existing filterMovies / filterTelevision, never rebuilt), so only its owner ever sees it. The write ordering is what keeps this leak-safe: a run delivers rows unpromoted, merges all the exclusions, and only then promotes rows onto Home, so a new row is never visible before the exclusion that hides it exists. Rows Plex cannot hide (wrong media type for their library) are swept away first, before anything else.

Every row also carries a second, constant label — shortlist (Plex stores it title-cased, as Shortlist). It hides nothing and excludes nothing; it exists so a co-managing tool can be told to leave Shortlist’s rows alone in one entry. Agregarr’s Exclude from Ordering (Plex Label) and Kometa’s equivalents take a list of labels, and the per-person ones are no use there: a 46-account server has 46 of them plus one per shared row, and the list goes stale the moment somebody joins or leaves. Existing rows pick the label up the next time they are built — there is nothing to run.

Before Shortlist first edits an account’s filters it snapshots them (restriction_snapshots), so Uninstall restores every share exactly as it found it. The one hard requirement is a Plex Media Server ≥ 1.43.2.10687 (older builds ignore the label exclusion).

Earlier versions ran an automatic Privacy Check that verified the hiding before each write and refused to write if it couldn’t confirm it. That check + its write gate were removed at the maintainer’s request; the hiding above still happens on every run, but it is no longer verified after the fact.