Custom Collections Section broke since January Patch

[Lighthammer 91]

Greetings,

I've been running my own custom collections section for about two years now that is independent from the collections section generated by the Movie Collections feature. Essentially, I use this section to group everything on my server that is related under a given property (IE all Star Trek Series, Movies, Books, Comics, etc) so that I can let the movie sorting feature do its own thing.

In order to run this feature, all I did was create a Library pointing to the folder I intended for the custom collection to live at and then placed the same collections.xml file used in the movies collections folder and then updated everything manually from there.

 

I actually used this setup for a number of different use cases; most prominently the example I pointed out above, but also for seasonal stuff I only give people access to my server on a seasonal basis (IE Christmas Videos).

Since the January Update, the ability to do this has been broke. I finally got around to troubleshooting it. I primarily attempted to start from scratch with a particular folder and see if I could get it to work. 

In so far, I've tried:
- Recreating the library

- Recreating the collection.xml

- Reinstalling the server (leaving all current settings in place)

Short of trying a from scratch installation to see if it works in a new test environment, I've done as much troubleshooting as I can think of to resolve the issue.

Is this feature just completely broke now?

[Luke 42080]

Hi, you can still group folders this way, but they are no longer tied in with the collections feature. For that you will need to use the features in the web interface to create collections. Please let us know if this helps. Thanks.

[Lighthammer 91]

Was this stated anywhere?

 

This is kind of a major feature to just change without giving the community a heads up.

This change broke *A LOT* of things on my server.

 

/sigh

 

Seriously guys, a lot of these changes in January made some very, very, very, very significant structural changes that broke a lot of things.

How can one be expected to run a server without assurances that major features like this won't be made without significant upfront heads up or alternative methods to utilize a format similar to the old design?

[Luke 42080]

Admittedly I actually forgot about this when writing up the release announcement, but to be honest, only a few people actually said they were still using the old method. We have basically spent the last three years trying to move everyone towards the newer way of doing it, and so much time had gone by that most people had already made the change by now.

 

I apologize for the disruption, but if you said you just started doing this a couple years ago, we were already advising users of the newer method by then, and also, this was never a feature that was part of any documentation or help guides, so very few people actually new that it existed. For features that are covered in the Emby wiki, there are no plans to remove any of them so you can feel safe with them.