It’s rather annoying that Sonarr uses thexem.de for it’s mapping. That site is not kept up to date and over and over certain shows seem to keep messing up. I think the designer of that site tried to come up with the most complicated unintuitive interface known to man.
We should be able to control our own mapping so we don’t have to rely on external sites.
Wouldn’t it be better for Sonarr to just follow the mapping as dictated by the scene? The only thing that’s important is that the episode is fetched properly. The proper season or episode number is no concern.
For example: Bar Rescue is so messed up and I’ve mentioned this show before here with no solutions.
“Shows messing up” is hardly XEM’s fault. And XEM, like TVDB, is kept in working order by the community, not by the people who run it. No community to fill data? No publication.
…because having to manually map everything yourself is obviously better than having it work out of the box 90% of the time?
If Sonarr did that, how do you suggest it handles shows where the SD scene group disagrees with the HD scene group? How do you suggest you handle dirfixes? How do you suggest you have mapping ready for shows that haven’t been released yet? All of these problems are why XEM is not nor ever will it be perfect. It is however the best thing we’ve got.
How would you suggest fixing that with the absolute random shit the scene has been doing there??
I am talking about scene mapping only. Those other issues you mention nMe, thexem.de handles those because I don’t think so.
The interface is convoluted and impossible to figure out on thexem.de, I would imagine if it made any sense there would be more people working on it to keep it up to date.
No, TheXEM doesn’t handle those either, because it can’t. It’s also exactly why some shows simply go wrong and always will go wrong unless you want to do a lot of manual work for every show that does not map to TVDB automatically.
It’s not impossible to figure out. I know because I did. Yes, there is a bit of a learning curve but none of us in #xem mind answering questions, helping out or even doing your mapping for you.
The UI is complicated because it needs to be. It needs to do some very complicated things, mapping episodes together on the episode-level. If you have some sort of brilliant suggestion on how to make the UX much better without loss of functionality, please share.
I’m sorry, but all in all your post comes across as “I don’t understand how these things work but because I don’t understand it must be crappy and has to go!” Not the way to start a discussion.
My main complaint is the waiting for a draft to get pushed through… I know its all done on a volunteer basis, but making even a simple edit (adding the last 4 episodes to a season for instance) and asking for a push in the IRC can take days or weeks sometimes to get approved. I know it’s just to protect us lowlife level 1’s from completely nuking thexem but it would be nice if there was a system for those that can approve a draft to be notified that it needs to be approved (and I’m guessing some sort of notification system exists for the pentavirate).
On a related note, I love that Sonarr now makes assumptions for missing thexem entries now because more often than not it is correct (or at least alerts you to the fact that it’s guessing).
TY, i’m somewhat proud of that little logic. (But then again, it was entirely self-serving coz Lab Rats got screwed up coz of shifted numbering.)
As for the rest of your message: There has been talk about the requirements for TheXEMv2 (including mappings that are currently impossible to do), but time is scarce and there aren’t actually a lot of ppl (read: none) volunteering to work on it… I don’t blame em, coz designing a complete backend and fluent webui for it isn’t something you do in a weekend… or even several weekends.
But it demonstrates a symptom I often notice: It’s easy to complain (or even rant) about lacking features or UI, but ppl rarely offer true ‘community’ solutions.
It’s also good to point out that TheXEM WebUI was never intended for public use. Even I don’t use it, I leave it to the experts.
Originally it was created to support the sickbeard anime branch, afaik Sonarr was the first other application that started using it. Growing beyond anime-only shows obviously made it run into design limitations, but absolutely nobody can be blamed for that. In our eyes it’s better than nothing.
In any case, I’ve asked TheXEM admin if it’s possible to track drafts and how long they’ve been pending approval.
That said, a show like Bar Rescue can’t be fixed without something like TheXEMv2 and extensive changes on Sonarr’s end as well. The current xem mapping seem to come pretty close though, except for a few release that got numbered differently by scene groups.
