That’s not what I got from @ShotFromGuns post. I believe the only value he sees with Recommended is discovering crossover cast not that it’s all that can be done with it.
I can see his point. Recommended is not something I use or intend to use.
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“Recommended” best serves Users that have no media.
They don’t have any, so they don’t know where it is.
The “Off The Wall” recommendations that are made seem to be wild-ass random placements - designed to tweek the interest of those that don’t mind if they’re jam-packed with advertisements.
Those folks ain’t us.
I finished an Episode of Pennyworth - at least 14 Murders - and Plex recommended I watch “Snoopy in Space” next.
No, I don’t think Plex has it’s finger on my pulse.
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I’d just like to take a moment to register my polite fury at this merger of on deck and continue watching. I now have no idea what I was previously watching, and have no idea how this is an improvement in the slightest.
I could be sorta ok with the merge (it’s still really dumb, but given the constant changes in the face of user frustration in the past, this wouldn’t rate). but the real issue is the complete loss of the knowledge of what we were watching?
like, I honestly can’t remember? or if I do, I’m not sure where I’m up to and I’d like to know from the home screen! my memory isn’t what it used to be so this is really ■■■■■■.
please, please for the love of god change it back.
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I think this article published yesterday will explain why a lot of these changes are happening to your On Deck, Continue Watching & Recently added, despite all the complaints and upset customers.
https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/plex-raises-50-million-to-become-one-stop-shop-for-streaming/
The article states, “our goal at Plex is to manage your media life for you,” said Keith Valory, CEO at Plex. “Our job is to understand where everything is, whether it’s from our free library of movies and shows, a subscription service, live on TV or SOMETHING YOU CAN PURCHASE”
"The goal is to include all major streaming services, along with PREMIUM TITLES AVALIABLE TO RENT OR BUY BY 2022
Do you see what is suspiciously missing from that well thought out statement?
CONSUMING YOUR OWN MEDIA
Sure, Plex will still offer this service to people who want to consume their own media but it is obviously taking a backseat to their other lofty goals
These changes aren’t based on what the current customer paid for and expect, they’re being made to attract new customers that don’t care about having their own content that they can make tons of money off of
If they cared about what we wanted they would postpone the forced update on 4-22 back until they can iron out all the bugs and changes they’re suppose to fix without a current ETA
BTW Dave I understand you’re answering everything you can but people are frustrated
I’m in the same position trying to answer all the complaints I’m getting from friends and family members that I encouraged into buying a lifetime Plex Pass
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Please see the official Plex blog about this. https://www.plex.tv/blog/one-giant-step-for-plex-kind/
tl/dr
First of all, our commitment to our millions of customers with personal media collections is rock solid. We can confidently say that we will continue to support, develop, and innovate even better methods to help you organize, curate, and enjoy your media collections with beautiful interfaces and dashboards that take the headache out of managing all those different formats, sources, and media types. We are stoked that we’re able to keep the media nerd flag flying, and we have some awesome ideas up our sleeves to make the Plex you know and love even more powerful, personalizable, and elegant.
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That quote was encouraging. This one,
“our goal at Plex is to manage your media life for you ”, not so much. 
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Can this thread be truncated or locked with a new set of split threads covering some of the various topics it’s now covering? This thread has lost a lot of its focus. It might be useful to split off into new threads with summary and new FAQ maybe?
I feel like I’m missing functional posts about updates and forthcoming changes because of the number of off-topic and argumentative\venting posts and sometimes Plex employees forget not everyone is tracking every post\thread as closely as they do for this information.
Edit:
I took that to mean “as software”, like it does already, not “as a company”; but maybe that is too optimistic?
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I don’t think that would solve the problem you are having here of people wanting to theorize and vent about Plex misbehaving.
I suspect @Dan_Bev is thinking the same thing, but when most software tries to guess what you want you end up with a bunch of cluttered junk with only one or two successes.
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True. I guess I was mostly hoping it would catch the folks repeating things that have already been addressed (combined recently added option, OD\CW server setting, manage library server settings, etc) but easy to miss in the 800+ posts.
Yeah, I guess I looked at it as bad phrasing … marketing speech gone wrong rather than an attitude or personal perspective. We use Plex to manage our “digital life” but don’t think of it as Plex managing it for us but us using Plex to manage it… but in dev\pr\product speech it could be phrased as “Plex manages it” and mean the same thing. I just wouldn’t phrase it that way with admins as a common customer… lots of “my way” ego with admins and marketing speak doesn’t always translate to admins very well. 
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Ah, mea culpa, I stopped to do this in the middle of something else and didn’t read as closely as I should have. It’s a nice change that I’ll appreciate playing around with. But it still doesn’t address my stated concerns, which are about the automatically managed home screen:
- Requires a library to be pinned for its contents to show up in a “new” queue on the Home Screen
- Those pinned libraries are displayed as separate “new” queues
- Those pinned libraries’ “new” queues cannot be reordered except by reordering the sidebar
Maybe some of this you have plans to deal with. Which would be fine for a beta feature still in development. This is not a beta feature; this is a feature you are FORCING EVERYONE TO USE IN MERE WEEKS. The point at which you announce a mandatory change should be when ALL the features are implemented and the majority of bugs ironed out—not when it’s clearly still a work in progress that REMOVES A HUGE AMOUNT OF SERVER OWNER DISCRETION about how media are presented.
(@Dan_Bev pssst “she”)
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Sorry… They? 
When you combine the quote with the removal of Managed Home it’s a little ominous.
Kinda looks like;
We’ll manage your media for you and just to be sure you don’t try to manage it yourself we’ll take that control away. 
I know that’s not what was intended. It just doesn’t look good.
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The CEO can say whatever sounds good from way back there at Plex HQ, but up here, the front line Users - filthy, bleeding and starving - are feeling something a LOT LESS than Rock Solid. It’s like that paragraph and the paragraphs we’ve been living since December - ARE FROM TWO DIFFERENT BOOKS!
One thing is certain: The rift between Plex and it’s Users has never been deeper, wider, longer…
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That statement from Plex uses broad terms like “awesome ideas” or “more personalizable” which is very similar to the language used in the notification for the update on 4-22.
I think it’s fair to say that the users posting here feel like things aren’t so awesome and are less personalizable
Why should we feel like the statements about the future changes are going to be different than the current changes?
All evidence suggests that we don’t share the same opinion on what those statements actually mean for the future
Also giving no indication of what those changes will be doesn’t do a lot to instill confidence especially if you don’t want people to speculate
The changes the CEO actually mentioned are just ways to stream outside content or giving us the option to pay for VOD material
Is that where the push for the recommended things come from?
I don’t need Plex to recommend things to me from my own server.
I RECOMMENDED IT TO MYSELF WHEN I PUT IT ON THERE
Buf if you recommend things to me that I don’t have maybe I’ll pay you to watch it right?
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I sometimes get the feeling that only the programmers know what the changes are. Everyone else seems to be surprised by them and the effect on other parts of Plex.
Why the push to eliminate Manual Home control by 4-22? What happens on 4-23?
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Why does it not make sense?
Yep this is the big question, as Plex almost never provide eta’s for anything.
Prior to the latest update Continue Watching was for shows that you were in the middle of…
This row had partially watched shows that you wanted to CONTINUE watching at a later time
On Deck, like in baseball means that it’s the show that’s UP NEXT in line of a series you’re watching. You wouldn’t say the baseball player is going to CONTINUE batting if he hasn’t got up to the plate yet
They are two different categories of progress in your watch history, which is why those two categories had different names and rows to begin with
The term CONTINUE WATCHING has been given an alternate definition
And the term ON DECK which was a perfect description has been abandon
Picking out shows in the new combined list that have a tiny yellow line isn’t as easy for everybody
Maybe that works for you but elderly people with a bad memory and eyesight are going to struggle
Maybe this change would make sense if I heard some kind of reasonable explanation for it but so far I haven’t
The only reason I’ve heard is they beta tested this and people liked it
The people who like it this way could have just disabled the old continue watching on their home screen 3 months ago and the shows in the On Deck would look exactly they way they do now in the new continue watching row
I’m replying to Orko so if anyone has seen me say similar things before I apologize for wasting your time
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Both rows had the same purpose, let you quickly continue what you were watching, if that is new episode of a tv show or a movie you were in the middle of does not really matter. It’s only natural to merge stuff that does the same thing so we can get more information on the same screensize.
You don’t have to pick shows with a tiny yellow line, you click on the show you wanna watch, if you were in the middle of it you continue from there, if not you get a new episode. In any case you “continue watching”, makes perfect sense.
Also you can enlarge the userinterface, at least on the webclient. On big screen clients the posters are half the screen and the line is not small.
No you could not get the same behaviour on the old homescreen by disabling continue watching since movies did not appear on deck only on continue watching. Having them all in on row is great and eliminates redundancy.
You are missing movies in your argument completely.
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There is no need to consolidate rows to save screen real estate. You can scroll indefinitely.
If screen space was a concern why did we go to multiple Recently Added rows instead of one per media type?
On Deck and Continue Watching used to be different things. You may like the combination of the two. That’s fine but why try to convince the rest of us that’s it’s better? The best solution is the option to use either method.
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