Yes, yes agree
Let me first explain a bit more how the locking mechanism works. Currently and for a long time, some users have had their account ālockedā.
When an account is locked, it is restricted from doing some things (like adding more items to your history) and the messaging is to contact support about it.
In the past, accounts got locked because an app or a script sent a lot of duplicates for users.
The fix, has been to identify the app responsible, ask them to fix their sync logic and clean up the userās history from real duplicates (this is not as easy as it looks, some users have real multiple watch and care about them).
What we want to do now is prevent this from happening sooner and extend that to other datapoints, like ratings.
In your case, if you have 23.8k real watch and 22.4k real ratings, we would temporarily lock the ratings (and only that), youād send an email to us and weād be happy to unlock more than 20k ratings for you because it seems legit based on the limits you shared.
If this becomes a support burden for us, weāll find another solution. But given the data we have, we think itās manageable like that.
We will have a similar process for the digital vs offline library. Currently, the problem is that weāre shooting on a moving target. If your library is in fact a 100% digital library, but it is displayed in the physical library section, you are good because we need to fix that first. Then your 31k items will be in the right (100k limited) section. And even if you reach that 100k limit in 10 years and that appears to be a legit use case, we can talk about it and expand the limit (if we technically can).
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We wonāt delete them. We wonāt delete any data unless it is something you asked. Or that is a planned migration to another feature with a tool we provide.
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Issues we know exist, yes. We are going to fix them before we move on to the next phases.
Nobody will have access to your data without your consent. Iām talking about third-party using the Public API.
We are going to fix that. Especially if weāre talking about our own integrations.
What Iām saying is we are exploring a different way to add and count.
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Talking for myself, I had an app that focussed on physical media only at first, then grew to be a general tracking app. Physical media tracking is a niche of a niche of another niche. I also think that, today, competitors focusing on physical media tracking would do that way better than Trakt. I donāt know them because, yes, Iām not a serious physical media collector.
I think thatās fair. I totally understand that.
Iām relaying this internally as an option.
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Weāre working on those cases. We need a better way to count offline vs digital content.
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Youāll hit the limit, contact us, and weāll give you more headroom.
You watched 56k and rated 40k of them, youāre a heavy rater.
I would be surprised to see that limit stay for 10 years. Thatās something that will be increased if it needs to be.
The list of features is long for free users as for VIPs.
If they are better at everything we do (or donāt), youāll migrate to them. It will be our miss.
Where does that friction come from? You can export all your data in multiple ways. Do you mean itās a hassle to import on other services? Or that itās just something you donāt want to do?
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@kcador Before I start, let me just emphasise this isnāt intended as an attack on you personally.
I think we need to hear from someone else in the Trakt senior team. You have personally been out defending Traktās decisions for months now. This is seemingly without backup or support. You have defended and youāve rolled back. Youāve argued and youāve clarified. Unfortunately, this means, if Iām frank, your voice is now tainted.
We need a fresh perspective and a new discussion with the wider Trakt senior team, especially its founders, who have gone silent and are nowhere to be seen. They are the people that many on this platform have grown to trust over the years.
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Question: do you have shows you watched as a kid or before joining Trakt that you marked as watched at the show level even if you didnāt watch every episode?
As I said in a previous answer, if itās legitimate usage over a long period of time, weād be glad to work this out with you.
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Hi, Kevin! 8 year VIP user here.
I keep a large Watchlist, including scrobbling with Reelgood, but itās a casual.
My main Trakt use is Library.
Iāve been adding hundreds of physical titles for years, as a compliment to my personal Access database. My boat-in-a-bottle is to complete adding the 8,400+ (and growing!) titles to my Trakt (Physical) Library.
As re: digital titles, with the exception of about a half dozen, most of my digital titles are warehoused through Movies Anywhere and Fandango At Home. Any plans to add automatic tracking from these services?
Bottom line: Count me as one of The Whos from Physical Media Whoville!
āWe are HEEEEEEEERRRRE!!!ā
Thanks for the info, and consideration.
Sincerely,
David Shepherd
Bunneeboy
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Thank you for the clarification - I definitely understand the need to prevent erroneous third-party clients adding thousands of watches incorrectly. Having the explanation about the locked state - and the fact that legitimate users would be unblocked again - shared with the original announcement would have helped a lot with understanding, as without that it (at least to me) came across as a āthis is a hard limit, when you reach it, toughā. If thatās not the case, I do feel like the wording could have been made clearer.
If the intention is to combat rogue scripts/clients and to not block genuine users, could one possibility instead be to have a rolling limit, e.g. 10k watch items per year? This would help emphasise that it is a policy that will not restrict users who have been using the site for 10+ years and have the watch data that comes with that, but would still catch scripts adding thousand of watch history items in a single day. I would argue that someone sitting on 1000 watch history items suddenly having 20k items added to their watch history by a rogue client would be more detrimental to the service than a genuine user with 99,999 watch history items adding 2 more.
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Yep, I totally agree with you. That explanation about the locked state clarifies a lot of things and needs to be shared with more people. This is certainly something many people didnāt know aboutā¦
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I donāt get why this wasnāt explained right away. How were we supposed to know that your ālimitsā are actually just triggers for your team to check if an account is causing problems?
If we get more space to rate or log our watch history, after itās confirmed that we organically reached the caps, I donāt mind.
Though I really donāt understand why you need those triggers, it should be pretty easy to automatically identify those reaching big numbers by using the service as itās supposed to be used.
Geez, sometimes I get the impression that the Trakt team enjoys triggering us for no reason.
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Respectfully, I told you donāt see myself this way. I do not feel rating everything I watch is āheavy usageā. This is a core feature I want from a media tracking service and is something that Trakt has previously offered for the last 15 years.
This is too much uncertainty for me frankly, youāre proposing a process where you are gatekeeping core features of the platform for long term users. Weāre now having to rely on trust to continue to use the platform. And to be frank - Trakt has previously reneged on promises it has made around āunlimitedā and āgrandfatheredā features recently. So the trust is not where it was.
I think you should reflect how you give this kind of feedback to your customers - I told you that I was one of your longest serving users and most loyal customers and I that Iām thinking of leaving - and your response sounds like ānothing we can do sorryā
Not going to go into specifics about how I might intend to leave the service or how. But yes the options available mean this will be a hassle. And 100% is something I donāt want to do - when I say Trakt was a platform that I loved to use daily for 15 years I meant it. But now feel Iām being forced out, and to be frank, you donāt seem to care.
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Suggested this near the beginning of this whole debacle, last week. š¢ Updating Trakt Limits for 2026 - #9 by dgw
Even with Kevinās clarification that they allegedly intend to raise the limits for users who āorganicallyā hit them, given the stated concerns over rogue clients adding junk data, the appropriate tool is still a rate limit or quota over time.
One wonders if sunk cost fallacy is at play here, i.e. the tooling to deal with account limits is already built and development inertia discourages changing approaches.
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Thank you for your clear explanation and reply.
@kcador
I use the collection feature like a watch list.
I add shows to it that I want to watch, so that I can go into my collection and look at shows that are not completely watched, to select which show I want to watch next.
So effectively it is operating as a watch list.
Am I someone who is āabusingā the collection feature?
There is one and only one reason I do it this way - itās because when I add the show to the collection I select the episodes release date and that then allows me to sort on that.
I note that even for this to have been an option provided shows that in itās original form, this was not only a supported, but an encouraged way of using Trakt. Why else would someone want to add items to their collection based on when they were released?
But I digress - there is one and only one reason I do it this way.
Itās so that I can go to my library view (v2) and sort shows by āAdded Dateā
The effect of this is that shows come to the top of the list that have recently been aired (because the added date is the āreleasedā date)
This fixes a specific UI issue in Trakt.
Without this, the closest possible option is to sort by Release Date (of the entire show)
But this causes shows which have been running for years to be pushed far down the list often multiple pages in.
Take The Simpsons for example - itās release date is 18 December 1989!
This means that if I were to use Release Date, I have to navigate 10 pages into my collection!
For a show that is currently airing!!
Do you understand the broken user interaction case here that is pushing me to use the library as a way to set the collected date as the released date (of each episode) purely so that in the library I can sort by added date, which brings something like The Simpsons up to the Page 1 where it should be as a currently airing show?
This entire situation would be completely resolved by allowing sorting in lists or the library by āLast Aired Dateā
I can understand that there could be database load involved with this if you are having to fan out a query down from show level to episode level in order to ascertain the most recent air date.
However, I think this is a highly prominent use case for caching the date of the most recent airing of an episode at the show level, and then you could allow sorting on that.
This would remove the dependency on the library for this use case, and I could happily use a watch list instead, sorting on āMost Recent Air Dateā
I didnāt misunderstand anything.
I used the -COLLECTION- as it was available and presented. Like I said, it gives the user the option of choosing episode release date. I used the available option.
That does not make it abuse. Abuse and misuse are not the same.
I need the answer from Kevin.
I am hoping this plays out well and that all our feedback is part of the reason this ends up working, but itās hilarious to me that a website called āTraktā that is dedicated to tracking peopleās media collection and watch history, and ultimately trying to become a form of media watching social media, is putting limits on the very users that have helped form and make said website.
Shouldnāt power raters and those who are flying the flag hardest be your most useful demographic?
If things like third party syncers are causing API drama the solution is for you to create one that works for you - which admittedly you have done now with your Plex scrobbler and sync. But it still isnāt working 100% because most of the people commenting here are categorized incorrectly - which is again, YOUR fault, not ours.
Coming out of the gate and talking about changes that are ultimately mostly caused by issues on your end seems insane to me
To be 100% clear: I just want to pay for VIP, setup my Plex sync with whatever tools you give us to do it, and have it work. I am not the website dev for the product I am paying for, if itās putting my media into the wrong category or duplicating my items, which it seems to be, thatās for you to fix or tell us how to fix.
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Here is something I found on V2ās Advanced Tab.
Wish I knew about this earlier, but it seems there IS a way to remove repeat plays from your history.
Also notice the limit it providesā¦ 200,000 as opposed to 100,000. This is on the same page that still says the limits are UNLIMITED. So I guess there really were limits before that we just did not see. They are just lowering them.
They give a way to fix one of their issues, but announced changes anyway. This is a feature that I would have been using if I knew about it and/or remembered that it was there. (But then again, I typically only remember the Delete Data/Account options available below it. 
)
Still not very happy about it.
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