📌 Follow-Up: Fair Use, Abuse Prevention & What Happens at the Limits

[kcador (Kevin)]

After our post about updating limits for 2026, we want to clarify a few important points and explain what this means in practice.

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Fair Use Policy = Abuse Prevention

The Fair Use Policy is not designed to restrict power users.

It exists to prevent patterns that:

• Degrade performance
• Harm the quality of the data we maintain and serve
• Create unnecessary infrastructure strain

If you’re using Trakt heavily: tracking what you watch, rating episodes, curating meaningful lists,… this policy is not targeting you.

It’s targeting structural misuse and automation abuse.

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What Kind of Abuse Are We Addressing?

Here are real examples of behaviors the Fair Use Policy is meant to prevent:

History

• Duplicate plays repeatedly added by third-party integrations
• Logging entire shows with thousands of episodes when only a few were watched

Library

• Using Library as a substitute for Watch History
• Using Library as a way to export all Movies and Shows referenced by Trakt

Lists

• Adding individual watched episodes to lists at scale
• Lists automatically generated that could be built using Smart (Dynamic) Lists

Notes

• Using Notes as a structured JSON database

These are not normal tracking patterns. They create data integrity issues and impact long-term sustainability.

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What About the 100K History Limit?

To put things into perspective:

If you watch 3 to 4 items per day, every day
→ it would take ~70–90 years to reach 100,000 plays

If you watch 10 items per day, every day
→ it would take ~27 years to reach 100,000 plays

For normal human usage, this represents decades of tracking capacity.

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Why Split Digital and Physical Library?

We’re formally separating:

• Digital Library → media you have digital access to
• Physical (Offline) Library → media you physically own

If you currently have Digital Library items showing up under your Offline / Physical Library, please let us know what you use to track them.

We will be working with media centers and third-party integrators to ensure digital access is properly recorded in the Digital Library, not the Physical one.

If you genuinely have more than 1,000 items in your Physical Library, let us know. We’re thinking through ways to ensure that limit makes sense for real-world use cases.

In practice, most physical collections are a mix of movies and shows (or seasons), not hundreds of individual episode entries tracked separately.

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Ratings Limit Update

To better support users who rate episodes individually:
The ratings limit has already been increased to 20,000.

This gives heavy raters meaningful headroom.

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What Happens If / When You Reach a Limit?

Right now: nothing.

The announcement, and the visibility updates, are about giving you transparency before enforcement begins.

You will be able to:

• See your usage
• See your plan limits
• Get time to adjust if/when needed

When limits are eventually enforced, accounts that exceed them may enter a temporary locked state.

This is not new. It’s the same mechanism we already use today to prevent abuse under previously undefined limits.

The difference going forward is simple:

• Limits are clearly defined
• Limits are visible
• Making enforcement more predictable

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The Bigger Picture

These limits are:

• Based on real usage data
• Designed to protect platform health
• Focused on preventing abuse, not punishing engagement

If you’re a passionate tracker or curator → Trakt is still built for you.

[haaitje]

About the ratings limit:

Okay, I get that you would want to stop the abuse as you described above. But for me, the ratings limit is still too low.

I watch on average 1 or 2 eps/movies per day now, but before I logged like 20 eps (anime mostly, 20min eps) per day. And I’ve been a VIP for 13 years, so for me the limit is way too low and therefore unusable.

I do rate episodes, seasons and series, because my ratings for a series does not reflect my rating for a specific season or even episode.

So a series of 2 seasons and 10 eps each, will get 23 ratings from me.

Hopefully I’ll still be able to rate my plays in the future.

About the Digital/Physical library:

Okay, the explanation is clear, but for some reason all my media has been shoved under Physical/Offline, whilst if you look at the items themselves it says Digital.

All my media is added through Plex, the webhook, so I have no idea where things go wrong.

I do have a Physical Library, I own so many VHS boxsets, yes I’m old, and DVD boxsets but I don’t have them linked to my Trakt Library. So all my media is Digital.

How can we/I fix this?

About the other limits, History, Lists:

For me that is enough, but keep in mind I’m almost at the midway point for your example by years.

“If you watch 3 to 4 items per day, every day
→ it would take ~70–90 years to reach 100,000 plays

If you watch 10 items per day, every day
→ it would take ~27 years to reach 100,000 plays”

I will not reach it anytime soon, but I’m not the only one who’s been here for 13 years and there will be members that will reach that limit in the future or even near future or even now without the abuse of third parties and adding all seasons and not only the things you really have seen.

About the limit reached:

What do you mean by locked state? Will nothing I scrobble be added or will it be temporarily be locked before being added? How does that work?

I voice my concerns for now because of my points and examples mentioned above.

Thanks for reading my reply and I hope my examples can be some consideration for the next steps taken by Trakt for the implementation.

[TopCat]

Hi, Kevin, thank you for the detailed notes on the matter at hand.

Could you please elaborate further on one thing for us - I currently have 10 lists total - up until the recent changes I had 2 because I was a free user and 8 traktaversary ones.

Now, that wasn’t an issue for me while I was a VIP, but since I currently am not able to subscribe for one reason or another, what will happen to the additional 5 lists that I have over the current set limit?

My account is over 14 years old and having it locked for something like that would be a bit premature. Also, while I don’t have tons of lists, most of them I’ve put great care into creating and making them well worth the time even for other users. So deleting them would be a big blow for me, and I suspect quite a few other users.

A bit more clarity on that would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your time.

P.S. - btw, just a heads up - the Forums button on V3 still links to the Lite section that has been closed for a while. Just thought you might wanna know.

[CajunRob]

@kcador

If you currently have Digital Library items showing up under your Offline / Physical Library, please let us know what you use to track them.

We will be working with media centers and third-party integrators to ensure digital access is properly recorded in the Digital Library, not the Physical one.

If you genuinely have more than 1,000 items in your Physical Library, let us know. We’re thinking through ways to ensure that limit makes sense for real-world use cases.

In practice, most physical collections are a mix of movies and shows (or seasons), not hundreds of individual episode entries tracked separately.

1. Original import was done with PlexTraktSync. New items after the inital addition were added with the VIP Plex Webhook. Subsequently Plex Sync here was used. Items that got missed were manually added. But you realistically knew all this. It’s been mentioned before. Like 100 times. You’re also aware of the issue that anything with the words “bluray” or “dvdrip” in a filename has been added to the Physical / Offline Library
2. Exactly who are these “Third Party Integrators”? Personally I’d like to know who potentially will be having access to my Plex Server.
3. Do you mean currently listed in there? Or actual physical items I’ve added there? Because currently it is showing 16,000 in there. Any of the digital items where the words “bluray” appeared in the filename and have been added there are items I physically own but for the purpose of Trakt they are all Digital items as I remuxed / encoded them. Examples of series would be the Flintstones, Northern Exposure, the Jetsons, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, True Blood, Justified, and numerous others. Plus numerous movies. And I’ll repeat for the umpteenth time, EVERY single item in that list is on my Plex Server. They are all digital files. Files that have been misclassified by Trakt.
4. Yes, this is true, but each EPISODE has clearly been counted in the current methodology.

[Duckyz95 (Ducky)]

@kcador

If you genuinely have more than 1,000 items in your Physical Library, let us know. We’re thinking through ways to ensure that limit makes sense for real-world use cases.

I take it no employees at Trakt are serious physical media collectors? Because you wouldn’t be saying this if they were. I recommend you check out groups dedicated to physical media collectors such as the bluray, boutiquebluray and 4kbluray subreddits, you will find many serious collectors have physical collections beyond 1000.

I’ve only logged half of my collection on Trakt and that’s at 600 already, I have over 1000 movies and shows on my shelves but stopped adding them when you originally announced you were scrapping the physical trakt library.

At the moment, I’m currently moving over my collection to a competitor because of this exact reason. 1k is simply not enough.

A solution to this problem would be to merge the limits of physical and digital, not merge the libraries but make them share that 100k limit. It make zero sense to even have them at different limits

[otakunet21]

all the movies listed in my library were manually added but all are digital purchases from Apple, including two of the tv shows added. Currently, the shows added are counting episodes instead of the series so my total count appears to be 511 when it should only be 374. All of these are appearing in the offline library when only one show is listed as blu-ray

[deemur]

@kcador

This gives heavy raters meaningful headroom.

Well I have over 40000 ratings so I appears that I have -20000 meaningful headroom.

And for the record I don’t see myself as a “heavy rater”

i did see myself as a loyal Trakt user who loved this product so much they started to rate everything they watched back in 2013, and has every since.

It certainly does feel like this policy is targeting me, whether intentionally or not.

I’m also on 56k watches. Sure, it might take me another 10 years to get to 100k, but what am I supposed to do then? What precisely does your product offer me at that point? What incentive do I have to not migrate to another service now in anticipation of this?

I have been using Trakt for 15 years now. I used to genuinely love this service. Now the only reason I’ve been sticking around is there is a lot of friction involved in moving off this platform to another service. But like some of your previously longest and most loyal users I think this announcement is probably it for me now.

[BeardedDers (Ders)]

It doesn’t matter if any of this is targeting power users or not. The issue is.. it’s going to affect us. I’ve manually added every single watch for over a decade. My history isn’t what I’m currently watching. It’s EVERYTHING I’ve ever watched. And this change effectively gets rid of the whole point of Trakt. I understand the reasoning, it’s just ridiculous.

No automation ever used over here. No webhooks, nothing. Target the automation abuse and not the power users. That would be the most effective way of keeping Trakt built for the user.

[Elicx (James)]

A site for tracking things that does not let you rate every single thing that you’ve tracked fundamentally fails at its job.

[jaAmber (Amber)]

My main concern with this change is that Trakt is going back on its word and removing its core feature of logging watch history (and I’m still unsure on the legal standing of removing features customers pay for) - “unlimited” will soon become “limits that you could feasibly hit, and then you effectively can’t use the site any more”. How can we trust that this won’t change in the future to let’s say 10k watch history items, or that you won’t decide to only keep the last year of watch history, or something like that? By implementing these limits for existing users, we have no certainty that things won’t change again. If these changes were only for new users, with existing users grandfathered in, that would at least be a show of good faith towards those who have used and supported the site over the years.

If you watch 10 items per day, every day
→ it would take ~27 years to reach 100,000 plays

For normal human usage, this represents decades of tracking capacity.

There are plenty of users (myself included) who have been tracking on this site for over a decade, and while I’m not near the limit myself yet, I wouldn’t consider 10 items a day to be necessarily outrageous. Kids cartoons are often quite short - Bluey episodes are about 7 minutes long, so someone could watch 9 or 10 of those in an hour. US sitcoms are usually around 22 minutes, so roughly 3 an hour, or 10 in just over 3 hours. If someone watched 20 items per day (maybe they have a comfort show that they play in the background, maybe they watch at 1.2x speed, etc), they would hit the limit in under 15 years, and a new user might think that’s a long way away, but if someone has already been using the site for over a decade, that suddenly becomes a case of them rapidly approaching the end of being able to use the site.

[IrishStevo]

If this is really about preventing abuse then 100 Personal Lists for VIP users stands out as low.

I consider myself a power user and I don’t abuse lists in any of the ways you have mentioned. I have 112 lists (103 public, 9 private) most of which I maintain daily, and intend to add more over time. Not being able to significantly reduces the appeal and usefulness of this site to me. I understand limiting total list items, I’ll never hit 100k, but a total list count of something like 500 seems more reasonable.

[Silrog]

I’ve reached 10k ratings, by rating everything I’ve watched in the past 9 years while I was a member here. Plus some few ratings on content I watched previously.

So basically the 20k rating limit will give me another 9-10 years to continue like that.

Why not simply give us the same limit for ratings as for our watching history, 100k?
It doesn’t really make sense to tell us that we are supposed to not rate 80% of what we watch.

[Qrusher14242]

Again, i just fail to understand the reasoning here. I mean, the whole point of the site is to track what you can use. Putting a limit on that seems to defeat the purpose of the site as a whole. Why keep tracking with knowing there’s a point in the future where you could get your account locked?

It’s like when MMO’s shutdown and they announce an end date. Most people leave after that cause why put in effort to something has an end date? I have used this site for years cause it made it easy to track what i watched. I don’t know how many people will stay if they know there’s a limit to how much they track. You also have to wonder if the limits will be changed. Once a company goes back on ‘Unlimited’ anything’s fair game really.

Im more surprised i guess that the limits are still there in VIP. I thought for sure it would be an incentive to sub but i guess not.

[jadeevans05 (Jade Evans)]

I can tell you that I am one of those people who are adding whole seasons/shows as watched all at once. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t watched the information being added.

I have multiple lists from over the years that I may later find and add missing information to my Trakt history. I also may adjust the older watch history dates because I wasn’t using Trakt way back when and I actually want a date on things… Just in this century.

Trakt also has this habit of removing episodes/movies/specials from my watch history… So I’m trying to add them back. Or I’m dealing with removing repeat plays.

I also currently have a list of shows/movies that were not available on Trakt when I actually watched the episode/movie. I make that list so that I can add them later when I finally get around to adding the information and/or someone else does.

As for actually watching episodes/movies. I play episodes at 2x-4x speeds as training for work. I understand what is going on and adjust speed if I don’t. So I watch a lot of episodes in a short period of time.

• So far this year… I have 1300+ plays. That number grows each day unless I’m taking a break.

And usually, I try to let the scrobbler pull all but the first episode I watch of a show. This way I can try to go back later and add missing episodes, but I at least have a starting point.

• Also a full data sync is needed every so often because some episodes are just not being pulled by the partial sync for what ever reason. But the full sync grabs some of the missing episodes from yesterday, last week and/or even earlier without me needing to go back and add the missing data

As for the Watchlist… It’s the main list I use. I barely touch the other lists available. So I exceed the new limit provided for that one list.

I do not have my physical DVD collection captured… But if I did, I have over 1000 movies and over 500 seasons/series last time I counted. And the DVDs I have not watched already have been added to my Watchlist some time ago. (Because that is the list that mattered most to me.)

• And yes, I do have incomplete seasons and or individual specials on DVD.

Everyone is different, but my Watch History and my Watchlist matters most to me. And I already exceed the limit for Watchlist. Fully expecting to exceed the Watch History limit sooner rather than later.

Being locked out of my account for using Trakt as a way to combine all my lists from over the years and for speed watching TV/Movies is not a benefit for me. It just causes me more worry/issues.

[dgw]

@kcador

To better support users who rate episodes individually:
The ratings limit has already been increased to 20,000.

This gives heavy raters meaningful headroom.

Is this a joke? Two users have already replied to this thread saying they’re already over this increased ratings cap.

If you can track having watched 100,000 items, you should be able to rate all 100,000 items you watched. Including the parent seasons and shows of played episodes.

@kcador

You will be able to:

• See your usage
• See your plan limits
• Get time to adjust if/when needed

The limits that cause the most concern (history and ratings, both currently “unlimited” for all users) are the same across Free and VIP tiers. How will seeing our “plan limits” help us “adjust” when there is no way to raise the offending cap?

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None of this follow-up actually addresses the core issue: Putting limits on history and ratings—THE most basic features of Trakt—and applying the same caps to someone who’s been here 15 minutes or 15 years makes zero sense.

I and others have already pointed out in the previous thread and now this one that legitimate human activity can rack up plays much faster than your given examples of 10 items per day.

You already keep track of items’ runtimes. The site already drops duplicate plays with the same timestamp. You can already flag accounts that add a bunch of nearly-duplicate plays based on scrobble timestamps, and notify the affected users to check their integrations.

Once again, the better solution is a rate limit, not a hard cap. Trakt’s database already has the info needed to calculate an acceptable rate* based on what each account is watching.

And let people rate everything they have marked as watched at least once (including “Unknown” watch date, and including seasons and shows).

* — Bear in mind still that some legitimate content is only 7, or even 2, minutes long—and that some people (like @jadeevans05 above me) watch at 2x speed or even faster.

[Zoomomax]

This must be a giant sketch or a prank.

Can we have a reality check from the team?

[lifeiscrazy (꧁『marr』)]

Personally the list going down to 5 hits me too.

Like why. Let it at least be 10 after being a loyal member.

Of make it 5 public 5 private.

Honestly I don’t care much about public lists.

For watch orders I look elsewhere. Not in trakt (anymore).

Trakt really going out of their way to make trakt even worse. And I haven’t checked my limits a v3 is an abomination.
So yeah maybe it doesn’t even matter in the long run

[great_vc (Vassilis)]

@kcador

To better support users who rate episodes individually:
The ratings limit has already been increased to 20,000.

This gives heavy raters meaningful headroom

@dgw

Is this a joke? Two users have already replied to this thread saying they’re already over this increased ratings cap.

Sorry, just actually notice this. Did i understood correctly, there is hard-limit on how many episode or movies or shows anything that has rating have? Surely that is not true. I understand maybe limits in a list like have 100.000 items due to database or indexing issues or something but limits on ratings ? next is limit in reviews? I surely must have understood this wrong.

[dgw]

No, you got it. In the previous thread the limit proposed was 100k history entries and 10k total ratings. They’ve increased the proposed ratings limit to 20k—still only 1/5th of your total history if you only watch items once (never rewatch anything).