[mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #1520: Don't automatically add new channels in mythfilldatabase

[Michael T. Dean]

On 03/16/2006 11:39 AM, Tom Lichti wrote:

>Michael T. Dean wrote:
>  
>
>>It also has the side-effect that many (most?) users will /never/ go to 
>>http://labs.zap2it.com/ to remove unwanted channels from their lineups. 
>>  That will mean that the DD servers will have to process (= more CPU 
>>time) and send (= more bandwidth) larger datasets to these users.  Since 
>>TMS has been fighting exactly these resource issues, this may not be A 
>>Good Thing.
>>
>Well, it would be simple enough for Zap2it to add a 'don't add new 
>channels to my listing' option (or just a 'lock listing' option), then 
>they wouldn't be serving all that extra data. An email to the registered 
>account holder with new channel updates would suffice, I think.
>

Ahh, to be young and to believe, again...  ;)

When TMS first set up DD, they received suggestions from many users 
about how to improve the service.  One of the suggestions was an option 
for allowing the user to decide whether new channels were added to the 
lineups.  One of the DD survey's they did even asked us which features 
we would most like to see added to DD, and the no-new-channels-in-lineup 
feature was one of the options users could choose (I did :).  TMS listed 
this as a feature they planned to implement.  Unfortunately, this was 
about 2 years ago, and--while I've been content to wait around naively 
expecting it to be implemented "any time now"--if Myth is going to take 
on the responsibility of preventing lineup changes (since the provider 
hasn't), I want to make sure we do it right.

I feel that because they're providing a free service, we (the Myth 
community) should do everything we can to help them make it succeed (or, 
from another standpoint, to prevent it from failing--which would cause a 
lot of North American users problems).  Therefore, if Myth users want to 
be able to prevent new channels from appearing on their lineups, we need 
to make sure that doing so doesn't increase the problems they're 
currently experiencing.  I think Myth proved itself a member of the 
community in "good standing" during their recent cut-back to 3-days 
listings (when they learned we only download tomorrow and +13 days), so 
I'd like to help maintain our status.

Mike