The main devs are rejecting the feature with really bad excuses. Basically, it comes down to two reasons:
I went down the rabbit hole on this the other day as I was trying to find a way to block unreleased episodes. It’s unbelievable to me the resistance they put against such a simple feature. Like no one is requesting to force it that way, just give the option to make it so.
The two reasons I saw for canceling the feature request over menu duplicates is the “use better trackers” mainly but also that shows are so often released or leak early they this setting would block you from getting them faster… Those are the dumbest reasons ever to not provide a setting that people are literally asking over and over again for.
The change is done for radarr so it might not be terribly hard to adapt into sonarr. Being open source I would have expected someone to do the change already but if they fight against it so much as a principle who would expect them to approve the change…
That’s a terrible way to put it and sincerely misguided in my opinion. I have a handful of public indexers, they work fine in 99.99% of the cases for my needs. In fact, never before I’ve had this issue until recently, with two unreleased episodes that were fake files. For me, not allowing the unreleased episodes is just another layer of security. In other words, using your example, I don’t want the water filter for my car to use the bad gas station, I want to get the water filter to make sure that if there’s ever some water by accident or not then it won’t get to the engine… If I see the indexers or trackers start publishing a lot of fake stuff it will get removed, but from public indexers I understand if there’s something ever getting past, and I don’t want the devs of some software deciding that me requiring that a show has been aired before I even try to download it is dumb.