The web interface

Eight pages in the sidebar. This is what each one is for.

Dashboard

The impact report: what Shortlist delivered versus what people actually watched, for a window you choose (7 / 30 / 90 days, or all time, 30 by default). Each headline figure carries its change against the previous equal period, so you can see direction rather than a running total. There’s also a Sync watched now button to refresh the numbers on demand.

What each figure means is at the bottom of this page.

Rows

Create, edit, and reorder your rows. Each card shows who sees it and how it differs from the defaults (sources, libraries, rebuild cadence, placement). This is where the whole multi-row feature lives. See Rows and templates.

Users

Everyone the server is shared with, plus you (badged owner, because plex.tv’s user list leaves the owner out, so Shortlist adds you itself).

Keeping the list current

Sync from Plex pulls the roster again after you invite someone new, or to pick up your own owner row on an install that predates it. If it finds somebody who no longer has access to the server, Shortlist turns them off and cleans up their rows; their history is kept, so you can switch them back on if they return.

Turning people on and off

Enable or disable each person, or use Enable all / Disable all at once.

• Off removes their rows from Plex and rewrites the share filters so they stop seeing the shared rows too. Turning them back on undoes the second half straight away, and their own row returns on the next run.
• Pause keeps their row but skips them on runs. It takes their rows off every shelf, and unpause puts them straight back. Neither waits for a run.

All of this runs as background jobs, visible on the Jobs page.

Per-person settings

Set a request tag, or add per-person row overrides: mute a row, resize it, or set its watch-history depth just for them. Opening a person shows their recent watch history (distinct titles, with season and episode numbers for TV), their picks grouped by row (long lists collapse behind a “show more”), and a Run now button to rebuild just that person.

Leaving someone’s Plex sharing alone

To keep their own row private, Shortlist adds label!= exclusions to every other account’s Plex restrictions. Occasionally that fights a restriction you set yourself — most often an allow only label list on a child’s account, where the whole point is that the account sees nothing but the labels you named.

Open that person, go to Settings → Plex sharing, and turn off Manage their Plex sharing settings. Shortlist takes back out the exclusions it added and never touches that account again. Their row in the Users list is badged Sharing untouched so you can see it at a glance, and Support → Sharing lists them separately instead of reporting them as a fault.

The trade-off, plainly: that account can then see other people’s rows, unless — as with an allow-only list — its own Plex restrictions already keep it away from them. Everyone else still hides this person’s row as normal, so leaving one account alone never exposes their row to the rest of the server.

This is not the same as switching someone off. Off means “no row for them” and still rewrites their filters so they stop seeing everyone else’s rows — unless you have also left their sharing alone, which wins, because it means “don’t touch this account” full stop. The two are independent: someone can have a row and untouched sharing.

One thing is deliberately left in place: if you have a shared row limited to certain people, the entry hiding it from everyone else stays. That entry is the only thing keeping that row away from people you didn’t pick, so removing it would undo a choice you made on the row itself. The catch is that later changes to who a shared row is for stop reaching a left-alone account — turn management back on if you need them to pick those up.

When someone leaves your server

Removing a person from your Plex share (or deleting a Plex Home user) is picked up by the daily user sync. Shortlist switches them off, deletes their rows from the server, and badges them Left the server in the Users list — distinct from an account you switched off, which is the same disabled state but means something completely different.

Two safety limits keep that sweep from acting on a bad read of plex.tv, because it deletes collections and runs unattended: an empty roster is ignored entirely, and if more than half your enabled accounts appear to vanish at once, nothing happens and an error is recorded instead. Both cases are far more likely to be a truncated response than a real mass departure.

A departed row stays in the list so you can see what happened. Remove clears it out: their pick history and run history are deleted and the row disappears. What it deliberately keeps is that account’s original Plex share settings, recorded before Shortlist ever touched them — so uninstalling Shortlist can still put the account back exactly as it found it. That record is the only copy, which is why Remove archives rather than deletes.

You do not have to clean up their share filters. Once their row is gone from the server, the next privacy pass drops the leftover label!= entry from everyone else’s filters on its own — but only once two independent checks agree the row is really gone, never on the strength of one read.

Accounts Plex restricts

Accounts with a Plex restriction profile (Younger Kid / Older Kid / Teen) are badged with that profile’s name. Plex usually hides collections from them, so no row is built. Plex also refuses the privacy filters Shortlist writes, so those accounts are left out of them.

Both go away by setting Restriction Profile → None in Plex → Settings → Users & Sharing. You can still limit them by rating or label there, which Plex only permits once the profile is None. A Plex Home account with no profile is an ordinary user: it gets a row and privacy filters like anybody else.

“Sees N rows of others’”. “Usually” is doing real work in that first paragraph: a Younger Kid account sees no collections at all, but an Older Kid account can see them. Since Plex refuses a privacy filter for any profiled account, such an account can end up seeing rows built for other people — and nothing Shortlist writes can hide them, because hiding a row is the filter Plex is refusing. Every run now checks each profiled account with that account’s own token and badges it here, on the person’s page, and as a dashboard alert if it finds any.

Two fixes, both yours to make. Set that account’s Restriction Profile → None, which lets the normal filter apply and hides everyone else’s rows from them; or turn the person off in Shortlist, which leaves them out of rows entirely so there is nothing of anyone else’s to find.

Runs

A live Activity log streams each user through history → candidates → ranking → delivering as the run happens, seeded from the server so a reload replays it. Per-user diffs are grouped by row then library (“added X to Movies, Y to TV Shows”), each library showing its own ranked picks. Errors are first-class rows with copy-for-GitHub buttons, alongside LLM token usage.

How we picked

Open a person and click How we picked to read the full pipeline for them as one flow, per library:

1. The watch history and seeds it started from.
2. Every candidate source’s query and what it returned, each title tagged with whether it made the shortlist or the plain reason it fell out (already watched, not in your libraries, lost the ranking cut).
3. How the shortlist was ordered. The plain-code score plus the two fair-share passes. No AI ranks.
4. What was finally delivered, and why.

The AI web-search card shows the exact Exa queries and the prompt the model searched from, and marks each proposed title kept or dropped, or struck through when it resolved to no real match (a hallucination). Long lists of returned titles expand in place.

A cold-start user, with too little history to search from, gets the same page, showing the highest-rated titles pulled from the server as their fallback — or, when their rows are set to skip instead (see Rows → People without enough watch history), the reason no row was built and how many titles they have watched so far.

Logs

What this instance has been doing, with a level filter (this level and louder), a text filter, live follow, Copy, and Download .zip for attaching to a bug report.

Tokens, API keys and passwords are stripped out server-side before anything reaches the page or the zip, so it’s safe to share. The file keeps the last 10 × 10 MB and always records at DEBUG, regardless of the console level in Settings → Advanced.

Requests

The approval inbox for titles your picks wanted but the library doesn’t have yet. Approve to send to Radarr or Sonarr, or reject so they never come back. See Requests.

Jobs

Every piece of background maintenance Shortlist does, in two areas.

The Jobs list

One per line: the name, how the last run went, when the next one fires, and the button.

Run now holds the six you start yourself:

A tag on the line says what a job changes on your server: Can delete on the one that can remove a collection, Changes Plex on the ones that write. Anything untagged only reads, or only touches Shortlist’s own records.

Automatic holds the ones Shortlist queues for itself when something changes: removing a disabled person’s rows, hiding a paused one’s, tidying up after a row edit. Those have no button by design: each one is aimed at a specific person or row by the action that queued it.

Open any job for its description, its settings (the frequency picker on the scheduled ones, the backup retention and restore list), what the last run reported, and Previous runs, that job’s own history. Anything a run is doing right now, such as a progress bar or a drift preview and its Fix button, stays visible on the line without opening it.

Activity

Every job run across every kind, newest first, filterable by All / In flight / Failed. Open a row for what it was asked to do, what came back, how long it took, and the error if it failed.

Anything that fails is retried with backoff and survives a container restart. If it finally gives up, it reaches the notification bell.

How long history is kept

Clearing run history lives on the Runs page. It clears the browsable history but preserves your dashboard metrics (delivered, watched and hit rate survive indefinitely), and doesn’t affect Shortlist’s ability to tidy up rows on Plex.

How long each of the two histories is kept is set in Settings → Advanced:

• Runs kept (three months by default) for the browsable run detail.
• Change log kept for the record of what Shortlist changed on Plex and in these settings. This defaults to Forever, because it is the only lasting answer to “what changed on whose account”, so it outlives the runs around it.

Both are applied by the nightly Clear out old records job.

Settings

One scrolling page, organised into a grouped sidebar sub-nav that jumps to each section and tracks where you are:

• Connect — Connections
• Rows — Finding titles, Row defaults, Row placement
• Add-ons — Requests
• System — Advanced, API access, Danger Zone

Each section is walled off by a rule, and its own sub-headings sit a clear rank below the section title. Every connection is re-testable in place.

Each row’s run schedule lives in that row’s editor, not here. See Schedules.

Reading the dashboard

Everything on the dashboard is scoped to the window selected at the top, the last 30 days by default. That matters more than it sounds: these figures used to be lifetime totals, which made every ratio a measure of how long Shortlist had been installed rather than of how good the picks were. A pick can only ever be credited while its row is still showing it, but the old denominator kept every pick ever delivered, for ever, so each night added ~60 permanently uncreditable picks per person to the bottom of the fraction and the number could only sink.

Watched — picks people STARTED in the window. A pick delivered last month and watched this week counts here, as long as the row was still showing it: this figure is about watching, not delivery. For a series it counts from the first finished episode, because that is Plex’s own definition and Plex offers no other — see Finished.

A watch is credited only when the title was in one of that person’s rows at the time. If a row rebuilt and swapped a title out, and they watched it afterwards, it does not count — they found it some other way. Once a pick is credited it stays credited, and finishing a series months later still upgrades it from started to finished.

Finished — of those, the ones they saw out: a film played, or a series with every episode watched. The two are worth reading together. On the maintainer’s own server, of 158 series picks credited as watched only 21 had actually been finished and 31 were a single episode — so a lone “watched” count makes a TV row look better than a movie row for a structural reason rather than a real one. A big Watched with a small Finished means people are sampling, not staying.

Dropped — picks someone started and gave up on. This is the one number Plex’s own watched flag cannot produce: to Plex, a pick nobody opened and a pick someone played for three minutes are both “not watched”, and they say opposite things. One never got their attention; the other got it and lost it. The hint splits off the ones that barely started at all — under 5% in, which reads as “wrong pick entirely” rather than “fair go, didn’t hold me”.

It counts only what Shortlist watched happen live, so it starts empty and fills in from the moment watch tracking is running. A title nobody has played since then is in neither count — unknown is not the same as zero.

People watching — how many people watched at least one pick, out of everyone currently enabled.

Avg to watch — average days from a title first being recommended to it first being watched, over titles first watched in the window. Lower is better, and the change arrow is coloured accordingly.

Landing rate — the one percentage, and the only one computed carefully enough to trust. It is the share of picks watched while their row was still showing them, measured over a settled group: picks delivered in the window and at least 30 days ago. A pick delivered yesterday is still sitting in the row — it has not yet had its chance to be watched and dropped — so counting it would drag the rate toward zero for no reason. On a 7-day window there is usually no settled group at all, and the card says so instead of showing a misleading number.

By person / By row — counts, not percentages, sorted by what was actually watched, with the finished count beside each. At these sample sizes a percentage is noise: ranking by one put a person with 1/31 above a person with 3/103. Sorting stays on watched deliberately — ranking on finished would bury every TV row under every movie row, which says more about the medium than about the row. People and rows with nothing in the window fold away behind a disclosure rather than filling the list with empty bars, and rows you have since deleted are hidden the same way, and their picks still count in the totals above.

Hiding a deleted row is the default because its picks are real history. If you want it actually gone (a throwaway test row, say) expand the disclosure and choose Delete their history. That permanently removes those picks from every total that counts them, here and on each person’s page, and cannot be undone. Rows that still exist are never affected, whichever slug is named: Shortlist recomputes what is eligible on the server rather than trusting the request.

Watches per week is always the long view: the last 16 weeks, whatever window is selected. Each column is split: the solid part is what got finished, the faded part what is still going. A past week’s solid part can GROW later, when someone finally finishes a series they started back then — the bar answers “what became of what landed that week”, and that answer genuinely changes.