What makes it different

Reaper is meant to be useful out of the box. Every shipped default is the cautious one, and the logic that decides a removal is pinned by tests that fail the moment a verdict changes.

TV seasons, judged like a viewer would

Reaper decides per season, and never removes a whole series in one action: a show you reap fans out into its seasons.

Tip

It follows where each person actually is. Someone part-way through a season keeps that season. The moment they finish it, the hold moves to the next one.

That hold is one season or the other, not both. It only holds both when Reaper cannot read the episode counts, which is the safe way to be wrong. Two details that matter in a real library:

• It steps over gaps. Finish season 3 when only 3 and 5 are on disk and it holds 5.
• It anchors on the most recent play, not the highest season number, so a re-watcher and someone watching out of order are both protected.

Keeping a cushion in front of a binge

By default the hold is one season: where each viewer is now. Set "also keep N seasons ahead of where they are" and Reaper holds that many more in front of every viewer, so someone on season 1 with a cushion of 2 keeps seasons 1, 2 and 3.

Note

The cushion starts at 0. Raise it if your users binge faster than you scan, so Reaper is never deleting the season someone reaches tomorrow.

The partway-through hold lasts 180 days from that person's last play of the show. Set that window to 0 to hold indefinitely.

Rule	Default
Always keep the newest seasons	2, counting only seasons with files
Always keep a show's first season	on, and it means the earliest on disk
Never remove specials	on
Keep seasons someone is partway through	on, 180 days
Also keep seasons ahead of where they are	0, no cushion
Never remove a season with episodes missing	on, so a removal never races a download
Ask me first when a removal looks unusual	on

"Ask me first" earns its row. If the keep rule would remove a season more people watched than one it is keeping, Reaper stops and asks you. A currently airing show's newest season is protected outright, with no switch to turn that off.

Caution

A short watch history holds everything. Where your history does not reach as far back as your library, Reaper cannot tell who is partway through, so it holds every prunable season. Automatic TV pruning stays inert until the history catches up. That is intended, and it surprises people who are waiting for TV pruning to start.

It explains the keeps

Every candidate carries the protections that were checked and did not fire, with the real numbers: "Only 2 people watched it here in the last year (it takes 3 to keep on that alone)." Nothing short-circuits, so every protection reports even once the answer is settled.

The panel separates what spared a title, what it cleared, and what Reaper could not check and is leaving to you.

Safety you do not configure

These are always on, with no setting to get wrong:

• The test file. The smallest measured item goes first, alone, and is verified before anything else is touched. If it misbehaves, the whole run halts.
• A phrase bound to the plan. You type REAP 7 SOULS 214 GB, recomputed on the server, so a stale tab and muscle memory both fail.
• A practice run that walks every interlock and sends nothing.
• Unknown sizes are kept. An item Reaper could not measure is never removed, and can never be the test item.
• The scheduler never deletes. Scans are automatic; removals are not.

What protects a title

• Curated lists. The IMDb Top 250 ships as a protected list, refreshed before every scan.
• Keep tags. Tag reaper-keep in Sonarr or Radarr, or curate a Plex collection named Never Reap from your phone.
• Well-rated titles, with a vote floor so a handful of votes cannot protect forever.

Things you turn on

Off until you ask for them, so nothing surprises you:

• The Leaving Soon shelf, a real Plex collection and label so your users can rescue a title by watching it. It also needs deletion armed, unless you turn on "Update while read-only".
• Discord, which announces one thing: what is leaving soon.
• HD/4K library mapping, so Reaper can tell two copies of one title apart. Unmapped duplicates are kept.

Before you commit to a change

The simulator re-decides your last scan under a draft policy with no calls to your services, so you can move a number and watch the count, the space, and the named titles change.

When an edit changes what a scan would gather, it stops showing numbers and asks for a fresh scan instead of showing you a confident wrong figure.