[menakite]

The <id> should be a unique ID.

So, does that mean that the actual issue you reported is fixed (shows not being scraped at all)?

[nikstra]

Well, initially episodes did show up under "Recently added episodes" but not under "TV shows". Now they show up as a single show. I have asked a couple of times in this thread how to choose an unique id but haven't got an answer. I can no loger find it in the wiki but if I google it I find pages that says that an ID of -1 should disable thetvdb queries. Scraping has worked before and now when I try the beta it does not. It seems like something has changed in the way the scraper handles the ID tags.

[menakite]

The scraper in fact shouldn't be involved at all, except in RPi and Milhouse builds but only to fetch (missing) season artworks. So even in this case it doesn't cause any harm.
(There's a specific patch in these builds - the problem it is fixing is that when you add a new season, it won't have any artwork.)

There was indeed a change in Helix - I don't remember the details, but it was about grouping TV shows by ID. That might explain the different behavior you get now. To avoid that I'd set <id> to the ID on TVDB. As I said (and that's confirmed by your logs) the scraper is only used to fetch season artworks - so it should be safe and the IDs there are unique.

[nikstra]

OK, but if the show isn't on thetvdb and I for some reason don't want to register and add it, then what? If I choose a random number as ID, for example 71663. Then I decide to add The Simpsons to my collecton. Suddenly my "random ID" did match with something existing and that is not good. I thought that the -1 ID was a good choice to indicate custom data. There should be a way to safely add ID's, something like TCP/IP has private network addresses.

[negge]

You could try -1 and -2.

[nikstra]

You could try -1 and -2.

Thanks, that worked. So, are you saying that one can use negative numbers in general to indicate "non-official" ID's?