Make feature request votes mean something

General Discussions
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Lets make Feature Suggestion votes mean something. There have been many suggestions that have literally thousands of votes and have been open for half a decade or longer with no progress.

For example, Plexreader for comics books and PDFs has been open for 7 years with 2843 votes (at time of post). This means that for 7 years, 2843 people have been limited on how they can distribute their votes and promote other interesting features.

Some of these features seem almost essential, like Google Home integration (open 7 years, 2452 votes). With the ever increasing number of users, especially technical users who are proficient enough in technology to be setting up a Plex Media Server, this seems like this should have been a priority that was shuffled straight to the top rather than being ignored for 7 years.

Other features seem so trivial to add, Like the ability to match TV episodes against the “Alternate Order” API call from TheTVDB (open 3 years, 365 votes) that would be extremely useful for the shows that contain multiple shorts. Animaniacs is an example of one of these shows. From my perspective at least (and I could be wrong) it seems much simpler for the Plex team to integrate an API call into the code and roll it out in the next update than it would be for me (and everyone else who has these types of shows, think of all the man-hours) to run all the episodes through a video editor and manually split every short into its own video file then rename every file to match the episode. The new Plex TV Shows scanner is obviously not up to this task yet either as it still mismatches the titles if the segments are not separated. Furthermore, the current system of naming episodes as multipart makes the episodes to appear as separate titles even though clicking that specific title plays through the entire video anyway.

If these features are not achievable due to lack of technology, or lack or programming knowledge/experience, then this should be posted under the request as such and closed out so that people have an accurate representation of what to expect from Plex Media Server.

It’s not that I am unhappy or mad with my Plex server, just disappointed. It could be so much more with its existence. I had great expectations of what it could grow up to be, but it seems to have deviated from its original core concepts of what a home media server should be and do. These requests are from the fan base that follows and uses your product, you should listen to them.

3 Likes
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Well obviously they know this is a problem and want to sweep it under the rug. 10 minutes after posting this under feature requests it was moved to general discussion without a peep.

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They already do mean something do guide us on things we might do as described here. A couple of those high vote things are being worked on but are not easy and have to integrate with existing things so takes a while. Some things are not possible due to the technologies are not compatible with the way the server works regardless of what folks surmise based on stuff they read on the internet and we have to wait for the third parties to make them compatible. And w don’t like throwing those third parties under the bus because we still do want to work with them. Things we are working on take a long time to develop ( some times years) and integrate and we are not stopping everything everytime someone makes a request and talks down to us about why we are not doing what they want…

Saying things like this just because is suits you to believe it, doesn’t make it so.

In the past when we have closed and said no and said why, folks just complained and made a new request and don’t believe anything we say ,claiming we are lazy, stupid or whatever. And we are not getting into endless debates about them.

Yeah that’s right, because this isn’t a feature request. It is a rant, to which this will be my only reply. If I wanted to “sweep it under the rug” I would have just deleted it.

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Hence the reason I used the word “seem” and not “are”. I do not have a lot of knowledge in computer programming languages, especially considering the many different flavors currently available and used, however, one could conclude that since you already have the code in place to call for episode title names based on multiple different numbering orders, that changing which number/naming scheme and adding a line item to a drop down menu would be a fairly trivial task. This is just my perspective as a user and perhaps also the perspective of the other 364 people who also voted for this.

In today’s world that calls for transparency, a detailed explanation would be very helpful for the level headed to understand how far out, if ever, something will be implemented. Transparency is good and offers everyone the opportunity to hear the truth. And if there is something wrong with what you say, the opportunity to prove their reason you’re wrong. Not everyone will believe you, and that is their right, but then place the onus on the user to prove why your explanation fails, and don’t continue to defend blind accusations. Without providing a detailed explanation of the issue at hand you can only leave people to speculate. Furthermore, you leave out the possibility of being able to receive help from the community. There are plenty of smart people out there, some way smarter than me, and some willing to offer help for free. Even if you do not make your code open source, perhaps there would be someone that could still offer some helpful insight to a problem or offer a work around not yet thought of. Ignoring the feature request because you can’t do it, yet or if ever, because you don’t want to deal with a few irrational people “seems” lazy to me. Perhaps it was not an issue of people not believing what was said, but not being offered enough information to understand the issue being faced with implementation. And for those few people, you could link them to the explanation of the issue and close the duplicate request, as you do now for other duplicate requests. Yes, I understand that a more detailed explanation and/or moderation of the forum takes time, however, I believe that a tool that does many things mediocrely is not as useful as a tool that does a few things very well.

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I agree with this. In other places/forums where I get engaged, a popular feature request will often get a dev response, an answer of which we can then authoritatively quote to the next person to make such a request (for good or for bad). Here in Plex, whenever I see a replay to “add your vote to the feature request” I get depressed, because no action seems to ever be taken on them. You ask us to “vote” for feature requests, then seem to just ignore the more popular requests and do your own thing anyway.

I really love Plex, but I feel powerless to be able to contribute to this program with suggestions. It feels completely like a one way street, sitting outside in the rain (in these forums) just waiting for a scrap of info.

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Hence the thousands of times we have stated it isn’t easy and you will still make post like yours. Which only makes my point earlier that you won’t believe anything we say anyway if not conducive to getting what you want.

We don’t ignore anything. Whether you believe me or not things take a long time to implement. And when do give info it just leads folks to question it and call us liars, stupid developers or whatever and not getting into endless debate about it.

If we do actually say yes to something early or say “that is a cool idea” then we get endless. " “when is it coming” ," you promised", etc etc, “your liars”, etc etc, more topics like this etc etc. Which only lead to an endless circular debate which I have no doubt this will become.

We have said many times why we can’t do Google Home integration due to the way it works. That reason still has not changed. We leave it open because we would like to do it at some point which was stated in that topic many times. But folks still call us variations of, liars or too stupid to make it.

Comic and Audio book are a totally new library type and no one is against either of them and why they are not closed. But folks often think it is just a matter of change the photo or music library a bit and you could have it done quick. But it isn’t that easy and if we were just not ever going to do it we would say so and close it but folks would likely just make a new one for the same thing. (one of those is in the works but won’t be soon and anything could happen to stop or pause development)

More often than not we are developing or updating things that lead to other things. Like some things needed to wait til we made the new metadata agents because, many other things do and will build off it like editions, the metadata for streaming, watch state syncing and potentially the alternate orders from TVDB folks want. And we can’t stick with the old python agent framework forever.

We often need to make things not exactly like the request because we have to think of how it affects millions of users not just the thousand or so that made the request that sometimes think they represent all users, and often those things take a long time planning because there are lots of moving parts.

Sometimes requests actually do end up being simple or serendipitous events happen to make it possible which is why sometimes low vote requests may happen semi-quickly, or something that has been open for a long time suddenly becomes feasible.

Making yet another topic like this (to I guess, shame us?), isn’t going to make the man hours, the technology, legality, etc, etc appear to do whatever anyone ask for in the time frame they have deemed it should take.

I understand folks want our roadmap, but I’m sorry we are not going to provide it.

[Addition}

The reason we put a limit on the number of votes when we moved to this forum software is because previously every request had a thousand votes and they really did mean nothing. after we limited votes we knew that two factor auth, and multiple cuts were really important to folks so did them when we could

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First off I would like to know why you keep responding as though we are attacking you personally? There are many employees that work for Plex, some have been more helpful in allowing us to understand the problems faced, others have not.

I do not know why you are choosing to attack me and use me to generalize the actions of others. I do not aim to call people liars and dismiss their explanations. I do aim, however, to seek a deeper understanding of the issues at hand in hopes that I or someone else may be able to help. We don’t care if you had to ask for help to get it working, we just want it to get there in the end. Which also goes back to the first part about it not being easy. If you are struggling with being able to implement something you can ask for help from the community. There have been work arounds created by others in the community, for example Flex for Google Home integration. And while in its current state it is not an ideal solution, the fact of the matter is there was someone smart enough out there to make something to GET it to work. It may not work the way Plex currently envisions it, but it works now and can be a stepping stone to make the envisioned version a reality. If there is a will there is a way.

In further discussion about features not being easy to implement, simply stating so is a far leap for most people to “just trust me bro”. Further reasoning being provided with specific examples would help aid in the understanding by the users. And for the less technical users who may not be able to fully comprehend the roadblocks being faced, the more technical users in the forum would then be able to help assist moderators in explaining the situation to them. Having to search for off-site answers such as…

and then being vague stating directly that specifics can’t be given diminishes the trust level with the users.
I will admit that further down in the thread a different Plex Employee did offer a more detailed explanation. And I would like to point out that the information provided sparked conversation from the community which lead to a deeper understanding of the issue, suggestions of different angles to take, and requests of how to help, rather than posts “talking down to you” about how this has not yet been completed.

And then comments like yours…

are just straight up combative and show that the user is not the primary concern.

We want to see Plex succeed. We want to be able to help make it what we all envision it can be. But it appears as though some are trying to act as gatekeepers and look down upon us users as to say, “even if we explained it to you, you wouldn’t understand so we aren’t even going to bother”. All of us had to start somewhere, we weren’t born with the knowledge and talents we have today.

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After reading this discussion, I must say you are off the mark on many aspects of Feature requests and votes. I do remember back when this all started and subscribers were asked what they felt was a sensible vote number. I for one said three, why? Because subscribers would vote with what really bugs them. Not what they would like without a inside on what was possible or would be reasonably implemented to suit the big picture.

I believe Plex are on the right track with most feature sets and attacking Plex employees with cyber Rotten Fruit is not fruitful… Lol, I can’t believe I said that phrase. A bit of JuiceWSA has rubbed off on me, rest in peace old mate, not up to your standard, I know. Good on you @BigWheel

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A 5 vote quota all those years ago made perfect sense based on the number of features plex had at the time. It focused contributers onto the most important feature requests.

However, Plex has grown now and the current 5 limitation is used as another tool to silence the community. Folks just can’t vote on a huge amount of stuff.

1 Like
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I don’t believe I have missed the mark. Votes are there to show the developers what are things that are important to the user. The fact that Google Home integration sits in the #2 spot for number of votes should speak to the gravity of this request. Even if they are unable to satisfy this request, the fact that it is this important to so many users should at least trigger an in depth discussion for solutions or alternatives showing that they find the topic important enough to discuss, in my opinion at least. As for voting for things that bug me, these ARE things that bug me, and thousands of others, enough so that they registered on the forum, read through the posts and chose to cast their vote on it. The things that bother me I have used my votes to promote. However these problems still exist and the requests are still open. When there is such an overwhelming response to a feature, as there are for example with the Google Home implementation, if it is something that cannot be implemented, I feel that a detailed explanation as to why it cannot be implemented is not too much to ask. I did pay them for a Plex Pass subscription, and while that does not entitle me to anything other than the premium features, I would like to know where the software plans to be headed and why the program I paid for does not do what I want. I am a reasonable person and can understand if there are technical limitations, but then these should be discussed in order to seek a solution via other means or find an alternative. For example, if Google Home integration cannot be implemented (for whatever reason) can an alternative solution be created that could also meet the needs/wants of the user? This is real money that I had to work to earn and I chose to spend it here to support them way back in the early stages. So far I have been reasonably happy with what Plex has become, however I also feel that they have started to ignore their users over the years. And not just ignoring in the sense of not creating a feature, but of the feeling of exclusion of user input in general. It feels like a program that was built around community and sharing has left behind the community that has shared its support. This is not about “rotten fruit” or whatever euphemism you want to use, this is about wanting the voices to be heard and for acknowledgement. I will reiterate that while I understand that not all features can be added, an explanation of why, or a discussion about what else could be done, would go a long way with understanding and patience/acceptance from the community.

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