With all the naming issues it seems like it would be nice to just be able to set an episode to search with a user defined script/regex.
This way I could temporarily set shows with download issues to use the indexers naming and Sonarr could rename them however it pleases.
It would not be an option for everyone, but chances are with most naming issues the air date is right and a simple tweak to the parsing parameters could at least get the show to download automatically AND show up in manual searches. At it stands if the naming conflicts are too great a show doesn’t even show up in manual.
So we should be able to override that and search with more simplistic terms as a means to deal with that, it shouldn’t take too much code and you could add this field per show or per season even since a naming issue may effect one season but not others. Then Sonnar translates that to an API call and the user can view the results via manual search.
If a show or TV database service changes it’s naming standard, we still have immediate options to deal with it instead of waiting for the website and scene to get on the same page, I expect name changes in TV shows will only get more common and it works well to throw a monkey wrench into a system like this. A little fine tuning by users and simplistic debuging of results via a manual search would seem like an easy way to deal with that.
If you wanted you could even add in a little field where we could send the changes we made tos fix the name conflict back to Sonarr, like an easy to use shared community feedback system, but maybe that’s taking it too far. Just a field to force manual search terms with wildcards and such ideally using some standard language and having those results show up in some manual search field so we can test them would help.
I think we could also use it to tweak many other problematic shows. Really every episode could have this field and it could just inherit or be set by season with the ability to override. Some seasons don’t match up from America vs Europe releases and the ability to set parameters even down the episode level would be easy to add and potentially effective.
Set my additional parse options or whatever you want to call it… hit manual search to test and I can potentially update the whole season of just the half the season that needed it. It’s not ideal, but it’s easy to do and gives users more power to get better results.
It also wouldn’t hurt to have a fully manual show option. Just add in all the search terms and set the schedule myself and Sonar treats it like any other TV show and makes the folder and uses a generic SxxExx renaming standard. At least I could still have automatic download and renaming that way. Something like Plex doesn’t need to scrape data for it to show the Show name and Episdoes, so it would still download the show and show up on the server, which is better than nothing. It would be like the Sonarr version of an RSS feed, not ideal, but potentially functional when nothing else works.