I said before, and I’ll say it again: Those options don’t work. Was I NOT clear enough for you?
As it is, I found a way around that screen a little while ago. but since you have a problem with what I have to say, I’ll just leave it as a “Linux” solution to the problem. The screen was unresponsive, and I believe it was because I had just added a large number of TV episodes, and it was trying to pull in the metadata when the screen appeared on its own out of nowhere. The was some sort of conflict that made that initial screen unresponsive due the timing of its appearance.
The good news is Linux has many tools at my disposal. The bad news is that something like that is too much for older parents and grandparents who use PLEX over distances.
There was still NO “PLEX” way out of it.
I’m done with the lack of humility some users have about this issue. Regardless of how much you want to defend PLEX, this was bad behavior on the part of PLEX. Many of us still had it spring on us, and we don’t want it to begin with.
Seems to be working properly on a managed user account, which I just spent too much time setting up with watched data and playlists. Do not, for any reason, force this abomination on managed users. There is no excuse for not providing an opt-out for paying customers, but at least have the decency to not further destroy what little goodwill is left.
While I appreciate the actual feature, I do think that having an opt-out for people who don’t want to see any streaming services at all would make sense.
It can’t be all that hard to have a checkbox that says “Don’t search online sources” then hiding the external sources when you search.
Personally I like it but I think you should really err on the side of giving the user the final choice instead of making the choice for them. This is especially true if you are showing results and we haven’t selected as having any streaming services.
Folks do not get your hopes up. Plex has never, at least not for the last 5-7 years, showed any tendency to respond to users requests. Nor have they ever allowed users to opt out of anything that makes them money and the “feature” is clearly little more than “click bait” to give Plex another monetary stream.
For Plex, as I have said before, “Greed is eternal.”
Do they respond in those suggestion threads? Usually not unless they have clarification questions or do indeed reject one. That’s btw. clearly stated in the feature suggestion category.
Do they implement suggestions? Absolutely… the fact that there’s the long-running „big fish“ suggestions that have not yet been implemented (or might not be implemented anytime soon) does not establish that they’re not listening to suggestions.
Sure… there’s a few I would really love to see implemented — then again… it’s their product and we’re providing suggestions (and as somebody who’s been going threw tons of those threads I can tell you there’s lots of suggestions for which other users ask for the complete opposite… so even suggestions we perceive to be rather simple will require some complexity in order not to offend the other group)
I see your frustration but the way you paint things in all black or white is evidently wrong. Constantly repeating those claims doesn’t make them right.
My post was in response to Elijah_Baley‘s rant that Plex hasn’t reacted to suggestions or implemented any in years. I cannot comment on the complexity of breaking up the newly added features to allow disabling parts.
Again folks, lets keep this ON TOPIC. The topic is a discussion to fully disable a new feature plex has added its NOT to pile on plex and give a opinion on what plex has done in the past.
I FULLY 100% feel the frustration but these comments are NOT helping and are just adding to the perspective from plex that certain folks on this forum are toxic.
Man, it would be super nice for there to be a master switch, that… when flipped… would disable every external source, and took Plex all the way back to only showing the stuff we pointed it to. Nothing more.
“You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”
Which makes me wonder why there is such a lack of customization options. With more settings letting users customize what they want and don’t want to see, a lot more people would actually be happy.
And while I certainly not condone the overly aggressive reaction of some forum users since the Discover features were introduced, I do understand the frustration and where it’s coming from.
Plex as a product has the particularity of being something that can feel very personal for a lot of users. Many people spend A LOT of time and energy to customize the experience for them and for the people they share their library with. They curate the content, carefully choose the poster and background for all items, edit the tags and general information on everything, make finely tuned playlists, carefully arrange the Home Screen, etc.
So with such a personal product, new features that barge in and add unwanted stuff to their finely tuned experience can feel very jarring to people. Even if, for example, it’s just an added “Watchlist” tab at the top of the Home Screen that people can just ignore if they want to, or unwanted elements added at the bottom of search results. It can feel as if someone forcibly broke into their home and made all kinds of unwanted modifications.
I’m sure the Plex devs must be aware of how personal an experience their product is for a lot of users. The push back when forcibly adding visible stuff like some of these newly introduced functionality without much customization options is to be expected I think.
Considering how Plex is used and perceived by many people, I think all that is really needed to make a maximum of people happy are customization settings making it possible to choose what people want to see. I think a way to hide the new Watchlist tab and the added “More Ways To Watch” items when doing a search, for example, would make all the difference in the world on how people are perceiving these new features.
Back when Plex actually at least pretended to solicit input from users they occasionally would hole phone conferences to get input and see how things were going.
In one of those conferences it was asked why there were fewer and fewer customizations available and it was stated that the more choice there were the harder it was to maintain the code and the choice was made to let the users suffer rather than have the programmers face too many complications. (That last is my interpretation of what was said not the exact words.)
Devs didn’t make a mistake. This is a 100% purposeful marketing decision. Disappointed but not surprised. Regardless of my Plexpass, looks like I’m finally migrating to Jellyfin.
This is literally the one feature in Plex where you can please all of the people all of the time, if you could choose to opt in selectively or not at all.
Though of course, when we’re having this discussion we should acknowledge that this feature was implemented this way after a risk assessment about making it mandatory for business purposes.
That’s true. The majority either love this type of feature or don’t care either way. And then there are the rest, folks like me who see this as a dreadful intrusion into the our servers media.
Giving folks the opinion to enable or fully disable is just a good software development.
