[Implemented] Disable "News" from the dashboard

General Discussions
141

@STWallman said:

When I said earlier that I don’t think this feature release was handled well, this is exactly what I’m talking about. Why was V1 of News released without the ability to just turn it off? Seems to me like it was rushed out the door when in reality it could’ve waited until more control of it was available. It’s not like it was a user requested bug fix or anything.

I’m expecting it was because of some sort of licensing/$$$ agreement with the news company they recently acquired.

I hear you, I think that feature should have come out with V1 as well. I don’t think it was rushed, I just think (that’s the guy peeking in to one team from another team perspective) that they focused on getting other parts of the functionality going, particularly with the foundation of the feature. We acquired Whatchupp and this was about integrating the technology with in Plex and moving it forward into the Plex ecosystem. That said, the forum feedback was read and we promptly re-prioritized what was going in to the fast follow update to include this functionality.

142

@kinoCharlino “Everything is Awesome” :wink:

As a developer I know when the decision to add something is made it isn’t always thought through due to the focus of the person / people making it (ie, like this thing) - it’s a complete waste of time for the majority of the vocal users simply because we are using Plex for what it is - a Media Server. Expanding it into other markets is fine, but not when it comes at the cost of consumer goodwill. Apart from the UI improvements, the other new features like DVR are of no use to me at all, but they don’t intrude so are simply ignored (though I’m not exactly happy seeing another task running on my server when it’ll never get used).

Hopefully there will be an important lesson learnt

  1. Don’t add anything without the ability to turn it off, even if it’s on Plex Pass only (we are sort of the beta-testers - but that’s as much for fixes as for new features).
  2. Let people know what’s going on. The Whatchup acquisition makes sense for this, but I’ve got no interest in it, so until the last post I didn’t know it had happened, and view it along the same lines as “Oh, Commodore brought in dozens of PC hardware designers because it’s related to their business…” (just a FYI for the younger readers - Commodore went bankrupt due to bad mismanagement - that included, after rivalling IBM in terms of power and respect for several years).
  3. Remind the vocal people that the Plex Pass releases also include test stuff, so if something isn’t on the main track releases then people (myself included - sorry) getting all irate over it need to remember that it’ll still get changes before being put into the “real” Plex.

I also want to add:

  1. Some long standing bugs and omissions need to be addressed at a higher priority so long term users don’t get annoyed that all the development time seems to be going into things that weren’t even asked for.

Despite those bugs and bad decisions Plex is still improving, and the developers need to have our appreciation often enough that they enjoy their work :wink:

143

Awesome feedback, @Rycochet. Very constructive :slight_smile:

“Everything is Awesome” :wink:

Ok, I probably deserved that! This is how you plan on getting in my head :wink:

Don’t add anything without the ability to turn it off, even if it’s on Plex Pass only (we are sort of the beta-testers - but that’s as much for fixes as for new features).

Lesson learned here :slight_smile:

Let people know what’s going on. The Whatchup acquisition makes sense for this, but I’ve got no interest in it, so until the last post I didn’t know it had happened, and view it along the same lines as “Oh, Commodore brought in dozens of PC hardware designers because it’s related to their business…” (just a FYI for the younger readers - Commodore went bankrupt due to bad mismanagement - that included, after rivalling IBM in terms of power and respect for several years).

Great point. I use to play Monkey Island on Commodore 64. That thing was amazing. Fond memories there. My understanding of this is they tried to explain a bit about the direction Plex is going with Whatchup in the blog post and press releases. Since one of my duties is to be involved in the forums, I want to get a better handle of this. Feel free to PM me if you want to dive into this deeper, but what I would like to understand more about is how you see Plex providing user updates in the forum. Would a good approach be to direct the blog post and press release when a major feature is released? There’s always going to be some things related to business strategy that can’t be discussed here, but for sure there’s a ton we can chat about with regard to thinking and approach. We’ve tried to be more transparent, in that regard, with some newer features such as DVR & Live TV, and hopefully users have seen more updates and more ways to get involved, such as community supported tuner testing for tuners not officially supported by Plex.

Remind the vocal people that the Plex Pass releases also include test stuff, so if something isn’t on the main track releases then people (myself included - sorry) getting all irate over it need to remember that it’ll still get changes before being put into the “real” Plex.

You hit on something very interesting because we’ve discussed ways in which we can make this clearer, so users can make a more informed decision between using a public release vs. a beta. When we launched cloud and DVR in beta, we tried to make it crystal clear in the forums that it was experimental and things will break. But there’s another decision-point that impacts far more users, and that’s in the Plex Web UI. The “Update Channel” option in the Server → General settings have long listed “Plex Pass.” That could be misunderstood as being the appropriate version for any paying user. If you look at that option today on vs. 3.32.1 of Plex Web, you’ll see it has been renamed and now reads “Beta”, in contrast to the “Public” option listed. Hopefully that will be clearer for users, and those who want to use the current public release can more easily interpret that setting.

Some long standing bugs and omissions need to be addressed at a higher priority so long term users don’t get annoyed that all the development time seems to be going into things that weren’t even asked for.

Engineering does work on fixing bugs in tandem with new features. There’s always a running list of smaller features being worked on, so I’m not just pointing to big features like DVR, etc. CS has been advocating that we increase efforts in crushing more bugs faster, especially those that have been lurking around longer – and we’re working on that.

144

@kinoCharlino said:
Awesome feedback, @Rycochet. Very constructive :slight_smile:

Let people know what’s going on. The Whatchup acquisition makes sense for this, but I’ve got no interest in it, so until the last post I didn’t know it had happened, and view it along the same lines as “Oh, Commodore brought in dozens of PC hardware designers because it’s related to their business…” (just a FYI for the younger readers - Commodore went bankrupt due to bad mismanagement - that included, after rivalling IBM in terms of power and respect for several years).

Feel free to PM me if you want to dive into this deeper …

Happy to - but public conversations get more feedback from other people :wink:

… but what I would like to understand more about is how you see Plex providing user updates in the forum. Would a good approach be to direct the blog post and press release when a major feature is released? There’s always going to be some things related to business strategy that can’t be discussed here, but for sure there’s a ton we can chat about with regard to thinking and approach. We’ve tried to be more transparent, in that regard, with some newer features such as DVR & Live TV, and hopefully users have seen more updates and more ways to get involved, such as community supported tuner testing for tuners not officially supported by Plex.

Personally I’ve got almost zero interest in actively looking for blogs and new stories. I see the FB posts about new features (by which point it’s already in the main version). On Github they highlight new blog posts at the top, and the Plex WebApp has the Announcements section which gets a notification when something new gets added so it’s very obvious.

When I’m hitting update I always check the “What’s New” link first, but that tends to be more along the lines of a changelog than a definition and/or explanation (which is perfectly fine for maybe 90% or more of the updates).

Maybe combining them - if on the Beta track of releases have an extra specific “Beta Blog” section similar to Announcements. Include the Release Notes as new entries (so you can forget to read before updating and still find them quickly), and also actual blog style updates when things are relevant - with links to the relevant forum posts on here so people can give feedback in one place (and it doesn’t turn into a 10+ new threads all complaining about the same thing) - which also reinforces the whole “beta test” part of things.

Remind the vocal people that the Plex Pass releases also include test stuff, so if something isn’t on the main track releases then people (myself included - sorry) getting all irate over it need to remember that it’ll still get changes before being put into the “real” Plex.

You hit on something very interesting because we’ve discussed ways in which we can make this clearer, so users can make a more informed decision between using a public release vs. a beta. When we launched cloud and DVR in beta, we tried to make it crystal clear in the forums that it was experimental and things will break. But there’s another decision-point that impacts far more users, and that’s in the Plex Web UI. The “Update Channel” option in the Server → General settings have long listed “Plex Pass.” That could be misunderstood as being the appropriate version for any paying user. If you look at that option today on vs. 3.32.1 of Plex Web, you’ll see it has been renamed and now reads “Beta”, in contrast to the “Public” option listed. Hopefully that will be clearer for users, and those who want to use the current public release can more easily interpret that setting.

I think that part of what makes people like Plex Pass is getting things early - so my own view would be Beta, Plex Pass, and Public - Beta can have new features (such as News) and bug fixes. That then gets promoted to Plex Pass after a week provided that there’s only been Patch changes (semver style), or there hasn’t been a large discussion such as this one. I’d expect a large proportion of people on here would be happy to stick to this style of “Plex Pass” release, would feel special for it (we did pay after all), and wouldn’t get the sort of issues that caused this.

(Just reminds me of the Futurama “Executive” sketch :stuck_out_tongue: )

Then you’d get people like me and a small proportion who want to be on the newest fixes (they’ve often been very relevant and bugs make things unusable at times) and are quite happy to give feedback (in a far more sensible and polite manner when not surprised like that lol) so would like to be on a full “Beta” track. I’d also suggest putting an announcement in the WebApp asking for feedback when new things come out (same style as the “new server version available” announcement) - a short 5 minute survey type thing, but with enough info both in it and in the related blog post etc that says “can you look at this”.

Some long standing bugs and omissions need to be addressed at a higher priority so long term users don’t get annoyed that all the development time seems to be going into things that weren’t even asked for.

Engineering does work on fixing bugs in tandem with new features. There’s always a running list of smaller features being worked on, so I’m not just pointing to big features like DVR, etc. CS has been advocating that we increase efforts in crushing more bugs faster, especially those that have been lurking around longer – and we’re working on that.

That’s pretty much how I work too, but fortunately I sometimes get the chance to just go back and fix things that have been bugging me for a while. Short of giving partial read-only access to the internal bug tracker for transparency, there’s not much else that can be done - until bug XYZ is fixed you’ll get people talking about the same thing again and again :wink:

Just realised this thread has been hijacked… Maybe that’s a good thing lol

145

First, I thank most of you for keeping a constructive conversation here.
Honestly, my personality is a bit on the cynical side regarding Plex lately, but I don’t feel going into every post one can find trying to cause dissent by posting “I’m cancelling if…” or “You’ve lost my subscription…” or " $#($(# EMBY FTW $(#$ " over and over helps anyone, Plex company or end user.
Too many times I see that and it does not add any merit to a conversation.
Again, thanks.

My current soap box - with a few noted questions.
I grow weary of the ‘power-user’ “defense” I’ve seen used over the past few months from several of the Plex employees and even Ninjas.
That is, that we’re only ~5% of the Plex user base, and that we should remember the rest of the world.
By no means am I saying forget the rest of the world, I’m simply saying; stop counting us out.

Whenever some new (policy/feature/change) is (added/removed/changed) out of (seemingly as late) nowhere that is commonly disliked, I keep seeing new forum members post in droves. Many having less than 10-15 posts when I first see them.
I also find that some of the regulars I used to converse with grow quiet, and/or like me, grow cynical and somewhat wary.

I just recently realized there’s a Plex sub-reddit. I don’t use reddit other than an occasional google search result answering a question.

  • Is Plex counting the many people there that don’t have accounts here, or vice versa, in your ‘feature’ focus groups?
  • Are there focus groups for your features/additions? It’s sure not PlexPass users. We get to try new things, but by the time any of us post like/dislike/suggestions, it’s often already in a full release seemingly half-baked (the news feature being one).

Part of our PlexPass allows us to get ‘Beta’ versions of Plex with new features.
Lately, we’ve lost the feeling that anyone is listening regarding the beta versions.
Part of our PlexPass allows us access to extra forum sections that we are somewhat led to believe are special.
Lately, we’ve lost the feeling those sections of the forum are worth anything.
(Yes, the above uses ‘we’ as though I speak for all - I don’t, but I know at least 5 others would agree, who likely also could count for 5-10 other Plex friends)

Seeing the “forum users are only ~5%” in various posts across the forum sure doesn’t help these beliefs.

146

@JamminR said:
Whenever some new (policy/feature/change) is (added/removed/changed) out of (seemingly as late) nowhere that is commonly disliked, I keep seeing new forum members post in droves. Many having less than 10-15 posts when I first see them.

I’m in the low post category, though been a user for several years (since February 2014 apparently), and a developer (since the mid 80s) involved in various other things including beta testing the DivX box back in the early 2000’s - I was also part of the divx community support at the time until the majority of us resigned en-masse due to management decisions - so definitely got the cynical / wary part :wink:

I try to remember the phrase “Better to stay quiet and let people assume you’re an idiot, rather than opening your mouth and proving it” :stuck_out_tongue:

Email updates have kept me involved in this conversation as it’s relevant and (for the most part) interesting.

I’m not exactly sure what a power user is (I’ve got a NAS with 50tb or so of storage, and about to be upgrading to a new one with 80tb of storage as soon as the drives turn up, so do I count?). I think it’s more important to have a good grasp of both psychology and/or UX design to be able to be productive. Having views dismissed because of behaviour is understandable, but having them ignored because they don’t agree with what someone else thinks is how people think isn’t good.

Personally I’d rather read and react to one good idea that nobody else has come up with, than dismiss a hundred people saying the same thing simply because I don’t agree with them. That one person has a smaller % than those 100, but it should be the message that matters, not the numbers. Hopefully that’s another feedback thing that comes out of this :wink:

147

@rycochet - I believe we’re on the same page. Summarized - I’ve seen (or at least, noticed) more ‘low post’ users comment lately regarding changes, good or bad. I believe the hum has grown louder and should be heard, not dismissed as mentioned.

148

@Rycochet said:

Feel free to PM me if you want to dive into this deeper …
Happy to - but public conversations get more feedback from other people :wink:

Public is fine, that is what the community is meant for. Though often you can cut through the grease more expediently in a small group setting. I’m happy discussing in the place users prefer.

@Rycochet said:
Maybe combining them - if on the Beta track of releases have an extra specific “Beta Blog” section similar to Announcements. Include the Release Notes as new entries (so you can forget to read before updating and still find them quickly), and also actual blog style updates when things are relevant - with links to the relevant forum posts on here so people can give feedback in one place (and it doesn’t turn into a 10+ new threads all complaining about the same thing) - which also reinforces the whole “beta test” part of things.

I love this idea! I can’t make any promises but I think this would be really helpful in the ways you described. I’ll take this to my team for discussion.

I think that part of what makes people like Plex Pass is getting things early - so my own view would be Beta, Plex Pass, and Public - Beta can have new features (such as News) and bug fixes. That then gets promoted to Plex Pass after a week provided that there’s only been Patch changes (semver style), or there hasn’t been a large discussion such as this one. I’d expect a large proportion of people on here would be happy to stick to this style of “Plex Pass” release, would feel special for it (we did pay after all), and wouldn’t get the sort of issues that caused this.

(Just reminds me of the Futurama “Executive” sketch :stuck_out_tongue: )

Then you’d get people like me and a small proportion who want to be on the newest fixes (they’ve often been very relevant and bugs make things unusable at times) and are quite happy to give feedback (in a far more sensible and polite manner when not surprised like that lol) so would like to be on a full “Beta” track. I’d also suggest putting an announcement in the WebApp asking for feedback when new things come out (same style as the “new server version available” announcement) - a short 5 minute survey type thing, but with enough info both in it and in the related blog post etc that says “can you look at this”.

Promoted to Executive Delivery Boy! :wink: Great ideas, I will pass them along as I think this relates well to discussions we’re having.

Short of giving partial read-only access to the internal bug tracker for transparency, there’s not much else that can be done - until bug XYZ is fixed you’ll get people talking about the same thing again and again :wink:

We’ve talked about public bug tracker visibility and it really is a slippery slope. I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t expect it soon because it’s something thats could easily become a garage pit for reports. We could get really high quality, well reproduced and documented issues from some users, while also getting low quality reports with inadequate information, misunderstanding or disagreement of feature intension, edge cases, etc – that could potentially slow down the production and QA process. I wouldn’t say never, but it’s not a high priority. What we are working on is a new bug reporting and triage model for Plex Ninjas to use. Ninjas are all over the forums and they are in very close communication with us in our internal chat channels. They dogfood alpha releases and have access to specific GitHub repos for filing issues. We think that’s a more sustainable first approach at it. Actually, Ninjas already can do most of that, just now we are doing a more structured, streamlined process for triaging that involves them being more closely involved with a POC in engineering on the given issue. It’s sustainable because the volume of reports will be less, more focused, and better prepared (overall) – even though much of the data points will still be coming from the forums.

@JamminR said:
My current soap box - with a few noted questions. I grow weary of the ‘power-user’ “defense” I’ve seen used over the past few months from several of the Plex employees and even Ninjas. That is, that we’re only ~5% of the Plex user base, and that we should remember the rest of the world. By no means am I saying forget the rest of the world, I’m simply saying; stop counting us out.

Please allow me to clarify my writing. My intention of that statement was to bring perspective, not trying to be defensive though I can see how it is viewed like that. I want to reaffirm that we value the forum community immensely because you guys are our biggest critics and in some cases biggest fans. We get unfiltered feedback and reflections for this part of the user base. It is absolutely invaluable, and while we haven’t been able to meet the needs of every power user (either due to business, direction, prioritization, etc, reasons), we do strive to get as much of your feedback into the product as possible to make Plex better. It’s no surprise that the bugs raised in the forum can and do help the rest of the community who does not participate in the forums.

My only intension in that statement is to say that we do have to balance the needs of various user types and use cases, but have no intention of ignoring either one. For that, I apologize if it feels that way. We simply cannot only focus on meeting the suggestions provided by one group of users. It is a delicate balancing act. We’ve renewed our efforts in the forum to focus on helping users with issues, alerting engineers, and communicating micro-updates. I think some of the advice provided in this thread will help us take that a step further.

@JamminR said:
Whenever some new (policy/feature/change) is (added/removed/changed) out of (seemingly as late) nowhere that is commonly disliked, I keep seeing new forum members post in droves. Many having less than 10-15 posts when I first see them. I also find that some of the regulars I used to converse with grow quiet, and/or like me, grow cynical and somewhat wary.

My own thoughts on that are that there’s been a lot of change recently to the Plex ecosystem, or so it seems. We have many dedicated users that have been here since the beginning (Mac fork of XMBC days) or soon after. Plex may be going in a different direction than they as users envisioned and would want to see for the company. But it is a company and the goals don’t always align. Some things need to happen to support growth or the addition of new functionality, such as updating the privacy policy. I can understand the difficulty that can come from watching something evolve in a different way that I had hoped. Even though Plex is venturing into some new areas to help users get more legal content into the ecosystem, we’re not moving away from the bread-and-butter local PMS model. It may just be part of the media-focused ecosystem, not the whole thing.

@JamminR said:
Is Plex counting the many people there that don’t have accounts here, or vice versa, in your ‘feature’ focus groups?
Are there focus groups for your features/additions? It’s sure not PlexPass users. We get to try new things, but by the time any of us post like/dislike/suggestions, it’s often already in a full release seemingly half-baked (the news feature being one).

I don’t directly work with focus groups, but my understanding of it is we do involve users inside and outside the forum. Some if it is done through invitation-based NDA-driven alpha testing, others involve usage studies. I am aware that there is interest to expand this.

@JamminR said:
Lately, we’ve lost the feeling that anyone is listening regarding the beta versions.

I can see how some might feel this way, I just hope its not the majority as we have done some things recently to provide more interaction and communication to beta users in the forums. Clearly we have more to work on :slight_smile:

@Rycochet said:
Just realised this thread has been hijacked… Maybe that’s a good thing lol

It’s clear we have exhausted the purpose of this thread. Anyone is free to open a new thread to continue any part of this discussion you are interested in, just please @-mention me so I get notified. As long as we keep the discussion constructive, I’m happy to be involved. I work closely with a lot of teams. If I don’t already know the answer, or understand it well enough to elaborate, I can find out :slight_smile:

149

It’s clear we have exhausted the purpose of this thread.

That feels like a poor executive decision. Can I suggest that until the feature request to be able to disable the News is actually in release that this thread has a purpose?

Plus I’ll put this forward - saying “we’re thinking of the wider user base, we can’t just focus on what the power users on the forum tell us” in conjunction with asserting that the forum users are a vocal minority, and so by extension the non-forum users are a non-vocal majority: how does one work out what the silent majority want? Did they send psychic messages that they wanted news on their dashboards? Further, whether we forum participants are Plex Pass subscribers or not, it would seem reasonable to assert that many would be influencers (over choice of a media platform) - if that silent majority aren’t asking the forums for help, they’re likely asking us for it. 2 months ago my work colleague asked if they should consider Plex Pass. At the time I said “sure, given what you do it would probably be a good investment”. If I was asked the same question today I’m not sure I’d be able to say the same. That is the result when poor decision making and poor project management combine with poor communication to drop flawed products on a technically capable (how many of us are developers or have other roles in the IT industry? not a small number) core user group. You do that at your own peril (some of us will tell you that from personal experience).

150

@jungwirth said:
Can I suggest that until the feature request to be able to disable the News is actually in release that this thread has a purpose?

Good suggestion.

@kinoCharlino said:
We’ve talked about public bug tracker visibility and it really is a slippery slope. I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t expect it soon because it’s something thats could easily become a garage pit for reports. We could get really high quality, well reproduced and documented issues from some users, while also getting low quality reports with inadequate information

Make it read-only for non-employees.
You already get these type of reports in the forums many times anyway (good and bad and repeated).
I’ve seen others complain they report a bug for multiple versions to never see it fixed or even acknowledged.
Having a bug tracker you can link items to would 1) allow Ninjas and employees to point repeat reporters from the forums to a single link for the same bug. 2) allow users to monitor and know that a bug is ‘known’ and being worked on (even if it seems to never be fixed, at least we/they would know it’s known, something often missing in the forum posts.

Plex may be going in a different direction than they as users envisioned and would want to see for the company. But it is a company and the goals don’t always align. Some things need to happen to support growth or the addition of new functionality, such as updating the privacy policy. I can understand the difficulty that can come from watching something evolve in a different way that I had hoped. Even though Plex is venturing into some new areas to help users get more legal content into the ecosystem, we’re not moving away from the bread-and-butter local PMS model. It may just be part of the media-focused ecosystem, not the whole thing.

And that paragraph contains some kickers.
Here’s an issue I’ve been chewing on for a few hours and trying to formulate constructive words.
Please, pass this on to every employee up the chain of command. @Elan included.

Plex is horrible about publicly describing what it wants to be when it grows up.
Plex is horrible about sharing how it plans to get there.
Plex is horrible about sharing it’s feature intentions and decisions/reasons.
In agreement with many other regulars, I too can’t agree to recommend PlexPass to others, because like you’ve stated, Plex’s ecosystem is changing from what I and many others thought it might be years ago.

I can find no mission statement for Plex. I can find no customer commitment or company vision or quality commitment document on how Plex intends to maintain or obtain it’s missions\visions\quality\focus. (Heck, I just searched to make sure, and even a 3rd party Rasberry client has a mission statement.

I’m not change averse.
I simply don’t like change when there’s no real benefit described, no direction given on where the change is going or no explanation why the change is occurring.

151

@kinoCharlino I think it’s really refreshing to see someone from plex here again, it’s a good sign. Thanks for that.

Elan only seems to hang around reddit these days, I see Bigwheel posting here as well but he might work on his people skills regarding customers a little bit at times :slight_smile:

I hope this is an actual change for the better!

I’ve not run off to Emby, but admittedly was a little glass-is-half-empty about everything plex lately with the privacy policy soap opera, the mess that was pmp v1, the bigger mess that is pmp v2, the buying and killing off pfk development and total lack of acknowledgement or plex feedback regarding all that, technically leaving us without a decent TV client.

I’m gonna wait and see what happens in the coming time before deciding whether to switch to kodi or not at least.

Thanks for being active here. Stefan.

152

PlexPass for 3 years. I do NOT want news on my Plex. Logged into my server today trying to figure out how to get rid of this.

I want this GONE or I will figure out a way to block it.

153

@Infyj521f said:
PlexPass for 3 years. I do NOT want news on my Plex. Logged into my server today trying to figure out how to get rid of this.

I want this GONE or I will figure out a way to block it.

Disable option coming very soon.

154

I want to disable news as well. It makes Plex a bad user experience for all my users and devices. My Plex server is turned on only when a Plex user attempts to connect to it. Previously, since the only dashboard option was the server menu item, the user saw a blank screen for a few seconds while the server turned on. Now, because the dashboard has the news option, the user sees that option, the connection to the server is not attempted, and the user thinks something is broken. They must manually move the remote cursor to the server selection and select my server in order to turn it on. This poor user experience is a direct result of not being able to disable news.

155

@kinoCharlino said:

@Infyj521f said:
PlexPass for 3 years. I do NOT want news on my Plex. Logged into my server today trying to figure out how to get rid of this.

I want this GONE or I will figure out a way to block it.

Disable option coming very soon.

So what’s the latest update on the disable option. Its been a couple of weeks.

156

@donyzz said:

@kinoCharlino said:

@Infyj521f said:
PlexPass for 3 years. I do NOT want news on my Plex. Logged into my server today trying to figure out how to get rid of this.

I want this GONE or I will figure out a way to block it.

Disable option coming very soon.

So what’s the latest update on the disable option. Its been a couple of weeks.

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Same answer than on the privacy policy, latest UI changes, PMP functionality and the general status of the bug-fixing activities.

157

@donyzz said:

@kinoCharlino said:

@Infyj521f said:
PlexPass for 3 years. I do NOT want news on my Plex. Logged into my server today trying to figure out how to get rid of this.

I want this GONE or I will figure out a way to block it.

Disable option coming very soon.

So what’s the latest update on the disable option. Its been a couple of weeks.

Emby testing is going very nicely :slight_smile:

Also, at least they give feedback to their users, estimate release schedules for developments…Plex support has frankly been terrible and it is only now I have been looking into alternatives that I see just how poor Plex customer service is. It’s amazing how one puts up with rubbish service out of misplaced loyalty.

Plex wins on simplicity for their solution, but they are let down severely by their poor customer service. It’s a real shame…

158

@donyzz said:
So what’s the latest update on the disable option. Its been a couple of weeks.

Teams have been busy tackling bugs. This is being worked on, just not ready yet due to everything else they have been working on.

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A topic with constructive conversation with plex employee @kinoCharlino ! Nice ! let’s brainstorming :smile:

@kinoCharlino said:

Short of giving partial read-only access to the internal bug tracker for transparency, there’s not much else that can be done - until bug XYZ is fixed you’ll get people talking about the same thing again and again :wink:

We’ve talked about public bug tracker visibility and it really is a slippery slope. I’ll be honest with you, I wouldn’t expect it soon because it’s something thats could easily become a garage pit for reports. We could get really high quality, well reproduced and documented issues from some users, while also getting low quality reports with inadequate information, misunderstanding or disagreement of feature intension, edge cases, etc – that could potentially slow down the production and QA process. I wouldn’t say never, but it’s not a high priority. What we are working on is a new bug reporting and triage model for Plex Ninjas to use. Ninjas are all over the forums and they are in very close communication with us in our internal chat channels. They dogfood alpha releases and have access to specific GitHub repos for filing issues. We think that’s a more sustainable first approach at it. Actually, Ninjas already can do most of that, just now we are doing a more structured, streamlined process for triaging that involves them being more closely involved with a POC in engineering on the given issue. It’s sustainable because the volume of reports will be less, more focused, and better prepared (overall) – even though much of the data points will still be coming from the forums.

I’m agree with both side.

How to improve official plex communication
I’m agree with @Rycochet, official plex communication is terrible ( no offense :smile: ) but I see some improvement in the good way ( cf HW transcoding forum ).

I think reporting bug on forum is not the best way ( or why not having specific topic). In fact, i’m sorry but it’s a mess. Questions, topic and Bug in the same forum … We never know if you bug is taken account or if release contain the fix …

bug/improvement tracker

Currently, we can create “New Discussion / Ask a Question / New Poll”.
Why not adding new category “New Bug” and “New improvement” ?
Pro :

  • plex user have an identifying tool to report bug.
  • generate forum-bug/improvement-identifier
  • Specific topic per bug/improvement
  • plex ninja/employee can asked more informations/logs and reporting the bug to plex official bug tracker.
  • plex ninja/employee can provide a link to the official bug tracker (read-only) or only the status ( in progress, delivered, acknowledged, ect )
  • add the forum-bug/improvement-identifier in the release changelog.

I have personnaly so many bug to report :smile:

Cons:

  • More work to plex ninja/employee :smile:

new feature tracker

Every time i speak to my friend/collegue about plex, they said : “what ?? it’s possible to share to friend/family only specific movie but not pictures ? it’s a nonsense !!!” It’s a really problem with plex, we have the fealing that plex always develop unwanted feature and avoid obvious feature.
In order to share my weeding album to my family, i have to create a new library, it’s overkill :frowning:
Plex seems to be a “black box”, nothing in, nothing out.

thanks for reading this :smile:

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Just want to point out that my idea for a bug tracker is read-only - so only Plex employees can create issues on there, and if something from the forums is related to the tracker then a link can easily be inserted… I get enough people on Github asking for support on what is clearly a bug tracker… And don’t even get started about the browser bug trackers (shudder)…