As customers and users of a platform and software, I believe it is only fair for us to be very critical of Plex or any company if they should want to exist. It may have worked out for Facebook but this kinda of behavior shouldn’t be tolerated and it’s exactly why legalese are made to cause customers to get confused and frustrated, only to accept what is in front of them without asking further questions. That’s how Facebook and the rest were able to be successful. They believe their users are too stupid and are willing to let stuff like that slide. We on the other hand know this, should question everything and be part of an ongoing customer and business relationship.
There ought to be hard question grilling when we need clarification. Users being stubborn about this says a lot of how passionate we are of not wanting to let this application go to trash.
Nobody is asking to be able to “assert any ownership of, or control over, users with whom you share your server.” We asked for a way to turn it off for our MANAGED USERS. AKA the people we do have control over already.
As has been stated elsewhere, this feature should never have been available to managed users. It was specifically requested that this be available for them in the announcement thread and there was a clear “nope, not gonna happen” response. If it were to work with managed users, I believe that would be a bug.
Now, this obviously doesn’t cover Plex Home users, who are a different beast entirely. They are Plex users who you’ve invited into your home.
I see ChuckPa’s post as a win for Plex community and their families, and I am very grateful to ChuckPa for taking our concerns into those meetings.
Is it everything I wanted? No, but it is really the important thing: a commitment for an optional “Disable” switch for all new outside media content.
This is HUGE. I can’t stress that enough. Our content remains under our control. Our servers and clients remain under our control. We control whether outside content can mix with our content. This is wonderful news to any parent and should be wonderful news to everyone, whether you want Discover or not, or whether you like X movies or not. Plex is empowering us, the users, regardless of tastes. If you want all that stuff, you got it. If you don’t, then you won’t.
I would have been fully excited if we could also opt-out of our search terms being sent to Plex, but honestly I never figured that would happen. I see the path Plex is taking. However, giving an opt-out of the “Ways to Watch” is very good.
I hope Plex is able to make money from Discover and all their new ventures, as long as they stick true to their original mission of providing a software tool that empowers people to build their own local content servers they way they want and need for their families and friends. If Plex’s loses that mission, I believe Plex will make a few people very rich, but many people very unhappy.
Managed Users have no Plex accounts and cannot be invited to shared Plex servers.
Plex Accounts that are part of a Plex Home can be invited to shared Plex servers. The Plex Home Admin, cannot Disable outside Plex sources on Plex Home users, with their own accounts.
This is why I specifically made the distinction between Plex Home and Managed Users. Being in the former doesn’t mean or even imply that you are the latter.
FYI, the only advantages to being in a Plex Home is “fast user switching” and “ability to use Plex Pass features,” if the Plex Home owner has a Plex Pass.
This mob mentality came about way before this incident though because Plex has built up a pattern of various activities that haven’t sit well with it’s users, especially when it was noted time and time again that we asked for certain things from Plex to continue that relationship.
They failed multiple times before at this communication and so here we are, yet again. It’s a very mental draining relationship that some people don’t want to be apart of anymore.
Who wants to open their admin account and find multiple things changed abruptly without it being mentioned in the release notes.
Plex in the past has also neglected to identify or hint at app changes that would also dramatically change our servers behavior. Sometimes we have often caught ninjas and staff doubling down on saying that the bugs or malfunctioning of parts of Plex wasn’t occurring. Gaslighting. Referencing that it was our fault or that we didn’t use their settings correctly.
Only to find out in the release notes later in an updated build that indeed, there WERE problems and they eventually resolved them. But holy hell it shouldn’t be this bad.
This is why mob mentality here on the forums is needed. We are subjected to various patterns of bad behavior from Plex. We all have to rely on each other just to get problems solved. There is no dedicated phone support. There is no chat support. They aren’t even paying us to test out any of these features.
Plex has hugely benefited off this community without holding themselves accountable for their own actions and it’s sad how it’s thrown in my face that I didn’t abide to the TOS all the while they unleashed a beta feature out, knowing full well it wasn’t ready but MUST meet a firm deadline internally.
Thank you for expressing my point more clearly than I ever could. A few users are venting spleen over accumulated grievances. Understood. Carry on in good health.
I will leave all other aspects of this thread out of it, but would like to mention, that your above statement was not due to this thread topic, but because you in a post got personal, and used name calling!
In other words completely unrelated to the OP msg, and name calling is not allowed up here!
Great. I never, ever want to see this in any of my clients or server ever again. At least we are having a little progress on that end. We still don’t have the full list of metadata sources plex was pulling from because plex,inc refuses to tell us.
As in giving users the ability to completely nuke Discover from our clients and server? Hiding is not good enough. How hard is it to revert to an earlier version of server and clients so we can all pretend this never happened and move on?
What on earth was plex,inc thinking? Was there a featureset milestone that needed to get hit from investors? I don’t understand how you let one single mod get fed to the wolves yesterday, and how nobody seemed to know the mutany that is happening in the thread that is requesting removal of discover/more ways to watch exists.
Once it was clear that children could have been shown hardcore pornography due to an early alpha feature that was forced on paying users, the CTO himself should have been in the forums directing the response.
If I was given real access, I’d love to write a case study on plex,inc.
no i’m not. i’m asking for further integrations. hence my youtube tv example. that was given as an example of an app, granted much much larger than plex, that has worked out a partnership to authenticate/play external content inside their single app. i’m not nitpicking on this thread about discover. now my arguments on the other thread were derived from the treatment i got from chuckpa in this thread yesterday when i asked how the cache was built and he told me to drop it. then magically today he wants to be transparent. that i did most certainly nitpick.
@Kilgry is asking for this exactly has been this entire thread. keeps changing the wording slightly each time but they have generally been asking for exactly this.
