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Approvals and request allowances

Decide what people can request, when approval is needed, and how rolling limits are counted.

Use Settings > Request Settings for defaults, then the user’s request settings for exceptions. Check both layers when one person sees a different request flow.

You can require approval for new requests globally or per user. Pending approvals appear in the administrator’s approval queue. The request is already saved while awaiting a decision.

Review the exact title, target library, seasons or book formats, and selected quality before approving. A delivery outage is separate from approval. Approved requests can wait for service recovery without re-entering the approval queue.

Choose whether users may select TV seasons and quality profiles. If choice is disabled, the configured defaults apply. Quality profiles come from the relevant library manager; their names and behavior are not universal between instances.

TV specials are a separate scope. For a series whose TMDB and TVDB season organization differs, correct the identity mapping before approving the wrong season. See TV matches.

Allowances can cover these categories independently:

Category What is counted
Movies Accepted new movie requests
TV Newly requested ordinary seasons
Ebooks Newly requested ebook formats
Audiobooks Newly requested audiobook formats
Albums Newly requested music releases

Choose a rolling 1-, 7-, or 30-day window. All allowances start unlimited. Kids inherit ordinary User defaults. Administrators are exempt.

Accepted work counts even when it is pending approval. Duplicate requests, delivery retries, and already available or fully monitored work do not charge again. TV specials are excluded from the ordinary season allowance. Selecting both book formats must fit both categories together.

A rolling window does not reset for everyone at midnight. Each accepted request ages out of its configured window. Users can inspect their own allowance in Account settings.

Avoid confusing approval with storage policy

Section titled “Avoid confusing approval with storage policy”

An allowance limits requesting. It is not a disk quota, retention policy, or guarantee of delivery. External services still control their own search, download, and import behavior.

Cancelling a saved request does not mean an imported file was removed. Deleting a file in a media manager does not automatically erase the request history.

Phone categories can notify administrators about requests needing review. Discord can post those requests to one configured channel. Automatically approved request alerts are a separate option.

The Needs attention navigation group can hide an empty queue. Open it from Settings when needed, or change its device-local visibility choice. A hidden navigation entry does not disable approvals.