Full Request Lifecycle via "Pinning"

[kevincox]

This is a bit of a wild idea but I thought it would be interesting to discuss. I doubt it will happen soon but interesting to consider.

Right now requests are focused on making media available "I would like this media to become available". They then track requested → approved → available, but that is the end of it. However for my usecase I would really love if requests tracked the full lifecycle. So they would track → finished → deleted.

I'm going to call this new feature a "pin" rather than a request to make the explanation more clear.

1. User pins some media.
2. The pin can be approved and fulfilled as normal.
3. Once available the pin is still tracked as active.
4. The user can then release the pin.
5. The media can then be removed.

The TL;DR is that I am trying to track down users "are you done with this" when I need to free up space. But I think this model would enable some very powerful features.

Limits on pinned content.

For example:

• User can have at most N things pinned at a time.
• User can have at most N bytes of stuff pinned at a time.

Graceful Handling of Multiple Watchers

Right now people send me "finished' requests manually. But this can be tedious to manage if multiple people are watching the show. (I am currently adding and removing tags manually, then deleting when there are no tags left). With this pin model:

1. Users can pin an already requested or available show. Now I know not to delete it as long as there is an active pin.
2. When the last pin is removed the show can be flagged for cleanup (or auto-removed).

Personally I would also love to integrate this with request profiles. I know right now seerr is mostly set up for separate low quality and 4k requests. But personally I only keep one copy available (and can transcode to lower quality versions if needed). But depending on configurations I can see lots of models working with the pin model.

1. Like today you could have separate 4k/other downloads depending on which pins are active.
2. You could order profiles by "quality" and use the highest pinned profile.
   • Maybe there could be configuration/approval for upgrades, but new content would take the highest profile.
3. Possibly a combination. You could take the highest profile in each 4k/other group.

[NoobOnTour024]

Out of all the ideas to implement some sort of mechanism to (auto) delete content based on various parameters, this one is, by far, the best!

Implementating this would make a lot of sense and I think it would feel like a natural step forward. Much better than a lot of other 'hacky' ways to track or mark content for deletion.

[kevincox]

Reading some other related discussions a lot of people are talking about hooking into Jellyfin and using watched state to auto-delete. I this workflow could be implemented if seasons/shows would automatically "unpin" some period of time after completion by the pinning user. This could be a per-user setting to help people manage their pins. It could also be possible to customize each pin (for example by disabling automatic unpin rules for a specific pin).

Obviously these aren't needed for the core feature. But I think this model of tracking who wants the media to be available opens up a lot of flexibility for different workflows.