v1.26.0

A correctness release. Two independent reports pinned real bugs in the parts of
Bindery that decide what to grab and what to do with it afterwards: the
relevance filter could grab a completely different book whose title merely
contained yours, and usenet imports were quietly leaking every completed
download folder to disk forever. Both are fixed. Around them, this release is
mostly about Bindery telling you the truth when something is wrong — storage
health, VPN-blocked connection tests, and Grimmory's connection probe all stop
hiding behind generic errors — plus a search-first Add Author flow and a Calibre
path-remap escape hatch for mismatched container mounts.

Added

• Calibre push path remap (#1346) — Bindery hands the Bindery Bridge
  plugin the exact path it stores each book at, and the plugin opens that
  path on its side of the container boundary; when the two containers mount
  the library at different points (the recurring Unraid case), every push
  failed with "No such file or directory". A new Settings → Calibre → Push
  path remap field (plugin mode) translates Bindery's library prefix to the
  Calibre container's before the push, using the same from:to[,from:to]
  grammar as BINDERY_DOWNLOAD_PATH_REMAP — e.g.
  /books:/mnt/user/media/books. Malformed pairs are rejected at save time;
  empty means no translation, and aligning the mounts remains the preferred
  zero-config setup.

Changed

• Search-first author acquisition (#1227, #1516) — select an author result
  before reviewing monitoring and download options, with consistent localized
  add dialogs and inline errors. Stage 1 of unifying the add and search
  acquisition flows; the issue stays open to gather feedback before the next
  stage. Community PR from @magrhino.
• Base image and dependencies refreshed (#1527, #1528, #1529) — the
  distroless static-debian12 base moves to its current digest, alongside the
  usual grouped Go and frontend dependency bumps.

Fixed

• Usenet imports no longer leak completed job folders or library receipts
  (#1542) — import.mode was applied with no protocol distinction, so usenet
  downloads inherited hardlink/copy behaviour whose only purpose is preserving
  torrent seeding. The completed job folder was left behind forever — and
  invisibly, since post-import cleanup removes the client's history entry but
  not its files (one report: 2.4 GB orphaned from three audiobook grabs).
  SABnzbd/NZBGet downloads now resolve auto and hardlink to move
  (explicit copy stays honoured for operators who want the client's
  retention to see finished files). Separately, directory placements copied
  the whole job tree verbatim, so .nzb receipts and .par2 repair files
  landed in the library next to the media: hardlink, copy, move, and
  multi-disc-flatten placements now all skip download artifacts
  (.nzb/.par2/.sfv/.srr/.srs/.diz — .nfo, covers, and cue
  sheets are deliberately kept). Multi-disc flattening also works under move
  mode now (flatten via copy, then remove the source), so usenet downloads
  resolving to move don't lose it. Reported by cleb on Discord with both root
  causes correctly identified.
• Wrong-author grabs from embedded title phrases (#1539) — the release
  relevance filter accepted any release whose name contained the book's title
  words as a contiguous phrase, with no author check on that path, so a
  different work embedding the requested title could be grabbed and imported
  ("Reborn as an Assassin's Apprentice, Vol. 1 by okiuta" matched for Robin
  Hobb's "Assassin's Apprentice"; reported by cleb on Discord with the root
  cause pinned). Phrase and in-order title hits are now only trusted on their
  own when anchored — preceded by nothing but the author, a series index
  ("Book 1", "Vol. 2"), numbers, or filler words. When real foreign words sit
  in front of the title (usually another work's longer title), the requested
  author must appear somewhere in the release name. Releases titled with just
  the book title still pass, so the fix costs no recall on the common
  author-less naming shapes; the narrow tradeoff is that a release naming only
  a series name (no author, no "Book N" marker) before the title is now
  rejected rather than risk importing the wrong book.
• Bulk searches no longer burst your indexers (#1515) — "search all wanted"
  for a prolific author, filling a series, per-author auto-search, and the
  scheduled wanted loop now pace their indexer searches (a short gap between
  each) instead of firing as fast as slots free up. A 30-book author could
  previously flood a rate-limit-free Prowlarr into dropping requests, so
  nothing got grabbed; the fan-outs still run with the same concurrency caps
  but no longer sustain a tight query loop.
• Transmission polling on large torrent histories (#1524) — the download
  poller read at most 1 MiB of Transmission's torrent-get reply, so an
  instance with a few thousand torrents (one report: ~12 MiB for 5000+) had its
  response silently truncated and every poll failed with "unexpected end of
  JSON input", blocking imports. The RPC read cap is now 64 MiB, and a reply
  that somehow still exceeds it returns a clear "too many torrents to poll in
  one request" error instead of invalid JSON.
• Grimmory "Test connection" against Grimmory v3.x (#1485) — the connection
  test probed GET /api/status, a route current Grimmory (v3.x) no longer has.
  Its Spring security layer answers any unmapped /api/** path with a 401
  Whitelabel page, which looked like an auth wall (and was mistaken for one in
  #1448) but was really a missing route, so the test could never pass and failed
  with invalid character '<'. The probe now hits Grimmory's public
  GET /api/v1/healthcheck endpoint for reachability and version; credential
  verification stays with the separate login round-trip, so "Test connection"
  still reports whether your username/password actually work.
• Storage health now says why, not just that (#1427) — the
  "downloads and library can't hardlink" banner and the "not writable"
  warnings were generic, sending operators hunting through mount tables and
  permission bits blind. The hardlink probe now names the actual cause
  (different filesystems; same device ID but cross-mount EXDEV, typical of
  mergerfs pools, separate bind mounts, and Unraid /mnt/user shares; or a
  filesystem that refuses hardlinks, common on exFAT/NTFS/network shares) in
  Settings → General. And a failed writability check now reports the uid/gid
  the process actually runs as versus who owns the directory, with the
  user: "UID:GID" hint when they differ — the classic case being folders
  prepared for the stack's usual user while the container runs as the
  distroless default 65532 because user: was never set in Compose.
• VPN-killswitch timeouts are named, not just reported (#1474) — when an
  ABS or Calibre-plugin "Test connection" times out against a LAN-shaped host
  (private IP, bare Docker hostname, .local/.lan suffix), the error now
  points at the usual culprit: Bindery sharing a VPN container's network
  (network_mode: service:gluetun) whose killswitch drops LAN traffic, with
  the FIREWALL_OUTBOUND_SUBNETS fix named inline. Real upstream errors
  (auth failures, refused connections) and public hosts keep their unmodified
  message. Complements the "Running Bindery behind a VPN" deployment docs.
• Go race CI no longer times out (#1531) — split the race suite into six
  parallel shards so the large API and database test packages stay below their
  per-package deadlines. Community PR from @magrhino.

Docs

• Shared ebook + audiobook folder layout, and what BINDERY_DOWNLOAD_DIR
  actually does (#1426) — the Storyteller-style shared folder (an ebook and
  its audio files in one directory) is Bindery's default behaviour when
  BINDERY_AUDIOBOOK_DIR is left unset, since both naming templates share the
  {Author}/{Title} ({Year}) prefix; now documented with the resulting tree.
  And BINDERY_DOWNLOAD_DIR is not a watch folder — per-job import paths
  come from the download client's API, and the env var only feeds validation,
  storage health, the hardlink probe, and qBittorrent save paths — so the
  TRaSH split-tree layout (/data/torrents + /data/usenet) works as-is.