On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 7:45 AM, Christophe Dumez <email address hidden>wrote:

> @Patrick O'Callaghan: Most people don't actually need to use regex, but
> they merely input the TV show's name. Regex is a power user feature.
>

All the same, if regex is supported it should be documented. There are many
kinds of regex (Perl, Shell, Vi, ...) with slight variations and it's not
always obvious what applies. To take a simple example (not even a regex
really), what does the expression "foo bar" mean? Is it (foo/\bar).
(foo\/bar), (literal "foo bar")? This isn't specified anywhere.


> Would it really be useful if qBittorrent detects season and episode
> numbers? I would argue that most users, just provide a RSS feed, input
> the TV show's name and expects qBittorrent to download all new episodes.
> There are usually no old episodes in those feeds, nor any duplicates.
> The only duplicates there may be are for different qualities (720p vs
> regular). Parsing qualities would actually be a nice thing.
> Am I missing some use case?
>

Yes. When I subscribe to a new RSS feed I may already have some of the
episodes, yet the feed will typically tell me about the last few, not just
the latest one. The exact rules of what does into the feed are not fixed and
may easily vary from one feed source to another. Furthermore, none of them
I've seen actually tell you what the rules are.


> What could I do (concretely) to improve our current RSS downloader? and
> importantly, why would that help? (i.e. what is the use case?).
>
> You said that the RSS downloader is not really user friendly and that it
> is easy to make mistakes. Could you please point out what's most
> ambiguous/misleading? I spent quite some time designing the new RSS
> downloader UI but then again, I'm not a regular user and it is difficult
> for me to understand what's wrong with it.
>

One thing (which may be a bug) is that it can "forget" what torrents have
already been disposed of. Specifically, I subscribed to a feed which offered
a bunch of stuff I already had. I deleted each torrent from the download
queue and waited for some new stuff to appear, which in due course it did.
However at one point I updated my system and logged out and in again. This
apparently caused QBT to forget which RSS torrents I had deleted and start
downloading them again. Perhaps just deleting unwanted torrents is the wrong
way to do this, but in that case what is the right way? There's a button for
"mark items read" but all these items were already marked read before this
happened.

Also, there's no way to select a group of torrents in the right-hand panel
of the RSS tab. They have to be dealt with one at a time.

Furthermore, it would be useful to be able to tell that an RSS feed is
working, e.g. by adding something to the log every time the feed is
refreshed. Otherwise there's no way to tell the difference between a feed
with no new information and one that isn't working or isn't being read.


> Also note that I want to keep the RSS downloader more generic, meaning
> that it should be usable more anything, not just TV shows. Of course, I
> could add some TV show-specific features that get enabled only if the
> user explicitly states he is looking for TV shows. This would be fine by
> me.
>

I've no problem with having it work generically, but I think the TV case is
likely to be the common use so maybe some special attention should be given
to it.


> I hope we can work together to improve the UI. I had a quick look at
> TED's UI but it is very specific to TV shows. I also don't quite
> understand what is the point of specifying a particular episode number.
> Isn't the point of using RSS to download automatically ANY new episode
> corresponding to this show?
>

The fact that Ted allows you to specify a particular episode to start from
is actually quite useful. However I've stopped using Ted because the
maintainers say it won't be updated for a long time, because it runs in Java
and looks clunky, and because it frequently downloads fake torrents. It also
has some UI issues, e.g. you can't specify a generic set of filters ("never
download from this site") but have to repeat them for every torrent of
interest. That's why I started using the QBT RSS feature which I hadn't
really tried before now.

poc