Much ado about backfilling and importing

First, just a couple clarifications on terminology here. Backfill refers to manually downloading older header information to generate releases, whereas import refers to importing releases from a batch of NZB files.

Post processing:

The post processing stage of NN is where almost all useful information about a particular release is generated, however for the sake of simplicity I will only be discussing the "Additional PostProcessing" stage, which by default will say "PostPrc : Performing additional post processing on last x releases" Lookups and nfo processing are handled in a different part of the post processing.

This stage by default is limited to 100 releases processed per run of update_releases, and handles deep rar inspection (including password checking and rar contents) as well as the generation of mediainfo and ffmpeg previews.

This limit can be increased, but it will increase the time that update_releases takes to run, and may delay grabbing of new releases more than you like.

Spotnab command line

All spotnab command line options are executed by running 'php spotnab.php' from within the misc/testing/ directory.

You should not *need* to run any of these at any point in time for normal functionality, they simply exist to aid in troubleshooting, or to speed up particular processes such as GID generation.

Screen scripts & TMDBException

A number of NN+ users, myself included, have seen an issue with the TMDB API throwing an exception and having the screen script killed.

The simple solution for now is to remove "set -e" from the beginning of the screen script. "set -e" tells the script to stop when there's an error, so it will still throw the error without this, but it won't completely kill your screen script.

I would expect there would be a proper fix for this in the works soon-ish.

Update: As of 4:25 PM EDT on March 23, a fix has been pushed to catch TMDBExceptions, so you can svn up and this error should no longer shut down your screen script.

-Thracky

Basic Guide to Spotnab

Disclaimer: This guide assumes that your NN+ installation is completely up to date and functioning normally, but you have not yet enabled spotnab or simply don't understand the functionality.

What is Spotnab?

Spotnab is a way for NN sites to exchange information via usenet. Currently it is only used for the exchanging of user comments, but in theory could be used to handle much more.

Why use Spotnab?

Many NN+ users do not have a large user base, but still would like to have a human element verifying the contents and/or completion of releases.  Spotnab allows you to see comments on your releases even if you only have a single user on your site.