Pay-per-feature requesting

Feature Suggestions
1

Hey all.

What I was thinking was a pay-per-feature type a thing. I know many will say that’s dumb, why should we pay for features and I can agree with you but that doesn’t change the fact that many good requests don’t happen. So, how about we let money do the talking. I know the PlexTeam made the new voting system but other than the “new” look, it’s the same as the old one on the Vanilla forum.
I propose that we donate at the same time we vote. A one-time small nominal amount, NEVER to exceed a certain amount. Maybe even a nominal fixed amount. If the request gets denied then all donations get refunded back to us. No sense taking our $$ and not making the feature.
Sure, your donation may be tied up for many months until a decision is made…But what else can we do? There are so many great ideas from us in terms of features and they are lost in the wind for years til they are almost forgotten. Some may say this will bring out the lazy in the devs but I say, where are we now? Nowhere. There must be a way we can push the devs in a positive way to make the feature we want.

Anyway, what do you all think? Do you believe this will help facilitate the creation of features or just be a waste of time.

And no, I don’t work for plex, lol!!

2

Absolutely not. I think that instituting a pay for feature format would result in an even worse situation than we have now. It would lead to many many problems and even have the potential for abuses that would dwarf anything that could happen in the current situation.

It is simply a VERY horrible idea.

2 Likes
3

lol, how did I know you would say that. The desire for features are out there. I just wish they would happen. So whats your specific worries?

4

I really don’t think it’s a bad idea. I have so many requests for the server and all of these are partly for years in the forum and have been desired, but nothing happens. We also don’t get an overview of what’s planned. Sometimes I have the feeling that my own interests are above the interests of the community. Which I can partly understand, but it shouldn’t be so blatant. After all, many people here pay for premium features and to share the server with friends, but they make us wait years for important features that are nothing more than logical and extremely useful. I am aware that it must be difficult to get the system to run on so many platforms. Nevertheless, the development for some features takes me far too long and although I am not a programmer to evaluate it, I am not sure with some features, which would be very interesting and useful, if it is really so difficult to implement, that it takes so long.

Just the announcement of the new installer, months ago there was a trial version with several 100 feedbacks afterwards. Nothing has happened since then. The same often happens with transcoder updates. There comes a version then really many take part in the tests and report errors and give feedback and then sometimes nothing happens for weeks from official side until somehow 2 months later it then appears in an update. This is not official community work for me, if you don’t get involved as a developer and share information with the community.

The new forum is for many a disaster (for me too) it is anything but clear and user friendly. Maybe it’s better for the programmers and professionals, but what’s really important in such a large community? For me it’s the users!

I just think that in the last 1-2 years very little has happened in the important functions, for which most people use it, but new features have been added which are rather unimportant for me and many others and if you partly look at the wishes of only a few 100 were wanted, others which have 1000 supporters are continuously ignored.

There are probably already 100 posts where you criticize the releases, feature selection or the forum, but there is no feedback, explanations or apologies from the official side. Just disappointing for me. Unfortunately there is no serious competition that doesn’t make such mistakes, so there is no choice but to hope that it gets better and better.

But I’ve digressed. I would like to pay a little extra for some features. You could then use a small team only for these supporters and gradually add the features, these supporters then have access to test versions and get access to these features before, as is now the case with the Plexpass, only that for me this often misses his goal. Something definitely has to change, it has to be more in the direction of the user’s wishes

5

Agreed. Look how the VR feature has been received by many. And that was a client that Plex bought and hired the developer if I remember correctly.

6

So whats your specific worries?

7

I’m not sure if this is a good idea or not. But moving to such a model would require Plex to move at least part way off of its “We don’t reveal plans and schedules” stance, and they have shown a steadfast, and arguably unreasonable, refusal to budge on that.

2 Likes
8

I have no faith left in Plex whatsoever. The PlayStation app is a disaster, the UWP app is a disaster, miBox and FireTV devices were plagued with ac3 issues for months/years (might still be, stopped following), Plex for Kodi was pretty much abandoned, android sync still doesn’t work, cloud sync still doesn’t work, Plex Cloud still doesn’t work reliably enough, list goes on…

I will never, never give Plex a dime again for a feature that might or might not get implemented and might or might or might not work.

If some sort of donation system existed where i would be guaranteed development time and bug fixes for a given thing I might contribute, but I don’t trust Plex at all at this point.

9

One dufus with a bank account that wants to watch the world burn. “I’ll give Plex 500k if they’ll make it talk to all the health gadgets out there and track my health records…”

Even though I wouldn’t use it, it could mis-direct resources from base features.

10

That’s true in any case, not just the scope of this feature request.