Allow managed users to have access to shared content

Feature Suggestions
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41

What happens if you have this ability, and your friend shares out your content to his kids. And the kids get content that isn’t appropriate for them to be viewing. Is the “friend” going to blame you since the content is hosted on “YOUR” server, and not his?

Let’s not talk about a single friend sucking all your bandwidth down to a crawl because his daughter is watching Frozen on her tablet, the son is watching Cars 2 on his computer,the wife is watching Game Of Thrones in the bedroom and he’s watching the full BR rip of The Martian on the living room TV all at the same time. Or the fact that any of those can force transcoding due to bitrate limits, and then they all have buffering as your hardware can’t maintain 4 transcodes at a time. But hey, you just see that he has 4 streams going, but don’t really know what is going on with the whole thing, do you…

This literally has the potential to balloon into something real ugly, real fast. But you know, you want it, so it must be a good thing, right? You have the hardware to handle the transcodes or the bandwidth to support your friends all sharing with their managed user, right? You have the right mix of hardware and connections to support your 7 friends sharing out with their 7-10 managed users all simultaneously, huh?

How does that play into Plex’s policy of not using Plex as a commercial venture. Because you are going to need some high end hardware and a pretty large network connection to support all of this. But you can’t charge your friends for any of this, so how do you pay for it? Personally, I already have more than enough money into this without having to “Up the Game” out of pocket to support the idea. Do those friend’s Managed Users count against your 100 shared friends? Or is it just the original friend itself? How does all of that work, if this feature gets turned on? Does the Managed Users from your friend count against your home 15 users? Neither of those are right, but I could easily see justification either way…

I can see this STARTING with Managed Users, and moving on to friends, also. “Hey my managed users can share my friend’s content, why can’t the rest of my users?” That’s going to be the rally cry to get this turned on for all friends. And then you have even less control of your hardware and upload speeds as your friends suck it all dry. Next thing you know you’re sharing your media out with members of ISIS half way around the world because you shared your content with one friend, who shared it with another, who shared with someone else, etc…

On paper, this might look like a great idea. In fact it turns into a nightmare trying to juggle it all pretty quickly.

42

Slippery Slope arguments don’t work well with me.

If you want to discuss ways to add constraints, discuss ways to add constraints. But don’t think that it must therefore have no constraints and therefore is infeasible.

You’re also presuming that everybody you could possibly share with is going to spend more time on your server(s) than on their own, or the multitude of other options available from netflix, hulu, apple, amazon, hbo, and actual live tv (yeah, that still exists, really), or the multitude of music options…or maybe just reading a book.

The very same worst-case scenario you described is already possible NOW, just from general sharing. Saying this may make it more possible isn’t therefore necessarily true.

It can happen already by having everybody in the friend’s family be a regular user (the ‘workaround’) i share with, and it can happen by having the friend in question be signed in on every box they have and, literally, giving everybody in his household the keys, as in no managed or sub-users at all.

Both the ‘security’ aspect (kids getting the adult material - which is actually exactly why we asked for this in the first place, to have better controls for filtering at the family level), and the performance/demand aspect can happen today with non-managed users.

And this also fails to acknowledge that I can, at any time given that we’ve asked for the feature as an option, turn it off and discuss it with the family in question that usage is a little heavy.

2 Likes
43

It also shows you have not read my actual description of the request: I control what I share. I control if the person I share it with can sub-share to their managed users. They control that as a filter, just as they control what their managed users see of their own servers. Nobody asked for managed users to then do additional sharing, as managed users have NO other administrative tasks in the first place, so your entire ISIS scenario was built on a claim, effectively a lie, that was never asked for by anybody on this thread.

1 Like
44

LIE?!?!

I’ve voiced my opposition to this, as strongly as I am able to. As has at least one other long term member here.

Good Luck with your Life, and this request. If you feel you want it so badly that you are willing to insult someone over it, then more power to you. I will now make it a point to stay out of any further discussions you may originate. I don’t want to be accused of lying by someone who obviously has such a huge contribution to the community as a whole as you have made during your 18 months as a member here.

PS, it’ll be easy to stay out of your discussions, as you have been relegated to IGNORE!

45

Wow, I just jumped from page one to page three and ran into this.

(FWIW, we’ve discussed the original idea internally; definitely not trivial, but certainly interesting to some people. And you can of course work around by making your kid a full account.)

46

I know he won’t read this and won’t care. i said it was "effectively* a lie because he intentionally mis-stated what was asked for by me and others in order to build his slippery slope argument.

That said, what I wrote was also written in a bit of anger and did come out harsher than I intended. And for that i do apologize to the community and will consider my words with more care in the future.

1 Like
47

Elan, thank you for jumping in here. I’m glad to hear you have discussed the idea internally. We all understand that the complexities of code sometimes run deep but at the end of the day it is just work to do.

Please look through the rhetoric and protestations of dire consequences to the very real underlying use case.

I am a software developer and would be very happy to help or discuss the actual issue.

Again thank you.

Dan

1 Like
48

@jwsplex said:

And your very mention of the workaround (everybody gets a first-class account) is exactly the point of the original post: the feature set of “managed users” is very limited and therefore not as useful as it could be.

Feel free to give whatever access you want to Managed Users using your own server, but it is ridiculous to expect that same level of control when using a server shared with YOU, and not your managed users.

49

“server shared with YOU, and not your managed users.”

Again, nobody seems to actually be reading the request as it was written and as I clarified it above.

By default, I’m not asking that managed users automatically get access to ANYTHING. i’m asking for the ability on my end to allow the person i share something with to then be able to filter that content. Perhaps, it is ridiculous to expect that as the default setting, i agree, which is why we didn’t ask for that, and I have attempted to clarify that in writing at least 4 times so far.

If I don’t allow friend X to share/filter to his managed users, then he can’t do it. That’s fine. That’s acceptable. That maintains backwards compatibility and all of that.

But it is NOT “ridiculous” when i happen to know the family and know the friend’s intent. i have a lot of mature material on my box. I also have a lot of kids shows. I am sharing much of that with my friend. He is simply asking for the ability to filter that down to his kids’ account (a managed user account that mostly exists so the kids don’t get access to his own more mature material), and I would like to give it to him. Would I do the same for the friend who I know has 4 college-age roomates? Probably not. And the request would allow me to continue to have that control on my end to not allow that other friend to share/filter like that.

Maybe your use of managed accounts on your system is different. Fine. But don’t judge our request and how we are using the accounts (or want to, but this lack of a feature kinda gets in the way of that) because you aren’t using them the same way. The point of this is to allow me to share with my friend’s family and allow my friend his parental right to decide what of my material he wants his kids to have access to.

I’m getting sick of explaining this, and it is not “ridiculous”.

2 Likes
50

I don’t understand why so much of the commentary here is so hysterical—it’s seriously not a feature to get this offended by and conceptually (if not technically) easy to protect everyone’s rights.

I want this feature. Between me and the friends that I share with, we don’t think of sharing our servers as sharing between individuals, we think of it as sharing between homes/families so it makes a great deal of sense to allow the household admin to further share libraries with managed users. I understand that other people might not think of it that way, so of course, make the capability optional and perhaps even quite fine-grained. Also make it revokable — if you encounter sudden problems with bandwidth, the sharer should be able to cut off access either fully or to specific users.

But all the other crap people seem to be fighting about—privacy and whether content ratings etc. are all accurate etc. — that’s between me and the people that I’m sharing with. As long its a controllable feature that accounts for different “home user” structures: families vs. frat houses vs. home-users that don’t actually live together, why wouldn’t you allow it?

Seems to me that some people are sharing a lot with people they trust little—which I have no problem with! But the core philosophy of Plex is sharing with people you have a lot of trust in and know well and that should guide the roadmap (with appropriate controls in place).

3 Likes
51

+1, agreed with this

52

I vote for this feature too. I requested it previously and was shot down on the idea then. forums.plex.tv/discussion/160828/feaure-request-allow-plex-home-users-to-view-shared-content#latest

1 Like
53

I wonder if they are working on a new plex server version. It’s been on 0.9 forever. Hopefully, it has tons of network management features.

Can you do this with Plex pass?
54

+1 for allow managed user access friends lib, who shared content with me
and I’m agree with @mrmtb :

@mrmtb said:
The alternate, to those of you who feel that this leads to over sharing of shared content, is to create a request mechanism so that the sharer can allow the sharee to allow access to managed account to, exactly as we do for syncing content from shared libraries. Either way this is a great idea.

1 Like
55

+1 for this. Would really like the ability to give managed users access to certain media libraries… I Have a few managed users…ie an All profile which has access to all content, but would like to make a Kids profile/user account and assigned that content based on my libraries… The ability to assign content by library shares or content rating would be the best of both worlds.

1 Like
56

A common request from plex users is the ability to filter down shown content on some of their devices. For example I may not want my camera uploads to be direclty viewable in the living room. The plex team solution to this was plex home, a really nice feature that’s very close to work but unfortunately can’t be used because of this. I understand there are many use cases for plex home but i my opinion we need it to be flexible enough to cover them all, otherwise new features will instead be requested which will be more work in the end.

I must also say I have a little hard to understand people getting so upset about sharing to other people in the family even if that is the case. If your neighbor wanna borrow a screwdriver do you then tell him, yes you can borrow it put if your wife wanna use it you give me a call and ask right? Probably not, if you lend something to someone to normally trust that person to be responsible and use it correctly. Of course digital stuff is alway a bit different as it can be used simultaneously etc. but the principle is still the same. You trust your neighbor to not lend your screwdriver to his next neighbor but you are okey that his kid use it under his supervision.

In either way, kids or no kids, I think the first scenario is enough to justify this feature. i.e if plex home should be the official solution to filter down content for your selected devices we must be able to activate all content on these managed accounts, including libraries shared by friends.

57

It looks like there is now a voting feature on the plex forums. If you want to see this feature implemented, please vote for it.

thank you!

2 Likes
Ability to share library with a users home instead of the single user
58

5 years after the original post it is still a relevant topic. And I presume the low number of vote is because the people that comment +1 before the voting system was setup.

I completely Agree with @kiyose and @mrmtb the server owner should have the choice to share to a unique admin [Friend] or to an admin and his managed user. AND that option should be off by default.

So that the people who fear the “Sharing Gate” :wink: don’t have to change anything to keep their library private

2 Likes
Ability to share library with a users home instead of the single user
59

So I just threw in a feature request thread cuz I failed miserably at finding this one… (Thank you @beckfield, sorry about the dupe btw! :slight_smile: )

I’m very much in favour of like “Managed Sharing” accounts. I figure it’s up to the person I shared my server/libraries to to manage their family members. The primary thought is ease of use for children.

For those who may be curious, here is a summary of my other post:

If I share my server to a family member, only that account can see what I allow. But let’s say they have a child, who may want to view things on the Plex server, there isn’t an easy way of setting up restrictions for that child. It doesn’t make sense for a 4-year old to get an email address and create a Plex account for me to share to… or at least it doesn’t make sense in my world. :slight_smile:

So what about Shared Family accounts? I can share my server to my relative, allow them to create managed-sub-accounts. That way the relative signs into devices with their credentials, they can manage their family sub-accounts, their family can select their profile appropriately, and we don’t have a 4-year old watching Fifty Shades of Gray, they can watch Peppa Pig because that profile is only allowed to see certain libraries now.

2 Likes
60

Yes I share with friends and family, and for the kids i have to invite a separate account just to mitigate the accessible libraries. even if they have a plexpass and their own managed accounts for the kids.

1 Like