As a Plex server owner I don’t often see invites. IOW people aren’t inviting me. I’m inviting other people. Sometimes I get an invite from another friend and all I see is:
Clicking on the “I accept the invitation” link sends me tp https://www.plex.tv/ and I see a Tune in button, stuff about Live TV, etc. Scrolling down a bit I see links for signing up, getting Plex, etc. IOW nothing about accepting that invite and, of course, nothing added to my Plex. Is this really how we present ourselves to outsiders?!? Just trying to understand so I can 1) accept this invite myself and 2) tell future people who I decide to invite, how the invite process shakes out.
That’s just the main Plex webpage. If you are only being invited as a Friend, there’s nothing else to show so this is what you get. If they had shared their server, the message would be different and clicking the accept would take you to Plex Web.
Are you 100% positive that the link is simply pointing to https://www.plex.tv/ ?
If you go to https://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/settings/users-sharing instead, you should be able to see the open invitation and accept (or decline) it.
(unless the user has made it in error and has retracted it already.)
I’m 100% sure that’s where I ended up. There may have been a redirect involved. I no longer have the email to verify the link. It may very well be that my friend only invited me to “check out” Plex and didn’t actually share anything. I’ll have to ask him what exactly he did. However, if that’s all he did, then I was totally confused with where I landed and what I was supposed to do. The wording of the invitation is awkward at best. I mean what does “being friends in Plex” supposed to mean?!? It would be much better worded as something like “One of your wonderful friends has said you really should check out Plex, a media server. Click here to find out about Plex” instead of inviting me to be “Plex friends” whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Perhaps what he actually did is add me as a user but neglected to share any of his libraries? If so this is a perplexing way to handle such a situation (pun intended).
@OttoKerner, When I go to that link I see my Plex server with my users and no invites from my friend (though I do see where I shared my libraries with him).
Looking at your account, it appears that you have indeed accepted an invitation a few hours ago.
Take a look under the MORE item at the bottom of the left side bar. You should see your friend’s server there.
If the invitation was later retracted then surely that situation could be explained better too!
I looked under More. Nothing there for this friend’s Plex server. Aside from my server, I have a different friend’s server there from long, long ago. This makes me suspect even more that perhaps this new friend added me as a user but neglected to share any of his libraries with me. I’ve asked him exactly what did he do and I’m awaiting a response.
Not sure how this should be explained, if the email was already sent.
You’d have to have some sort of “sharing history” where such events could be recorded and preserved for later reference.
But I fear that this may just create further confusion in regular users.
While you can’t change the email that’s already been sent, you can change how the Plex web site responds to the click. If the user’s invitation is still active then show them the libraries that were shared with them. If the invitation was rescinded or missing then you have nothing to show the user 'cept things about Plex. You could, however, also put up a message saying something like “It appears this user <insert username/email here> has nothing to share with you. This could be because they have retracted their invitation before you accepted it or that he failed to share any of their libraries with you. Meantime, check out Plex”.
Writing good, explanatory error messages is really not that difficult. I wish more programmers would take it upon themselves to take a moment to write a clear error message. After all, at the point of error, they are the best people in the world to explain what went wrong.
Being a friend is just that. Nothing is shared, but your accounts are linked. This allows you to share stuff again later without them needing to accept. When you share your server, it creates the friendship and the share to the server. You can remove the share but stay friends.
Then say that!!! Because nobody’s gonna guess that that is what happened when they are merely redirected to https://www.plex.tv/. Surely you can tell that the web page was called from the friendship email and it would make it 100% more friendly and understandable if you put on that web page a blurb like you just wrote to me. A casual Plex user will not know nor understand the difference between being “friended” with the possibility of sharing things in the future and being invited to share media right now.
I was excited when chatting with my friend to find out that he had his own Plex server. So I invited him to my Plex server and shared all my libraries and said “Check it out”. And he clicked some sort of button to invite me as a friend. I don’t even know how to send a “Be my Friend on Plex” invite. Is that just “Add a Friend” without sharing any libraries? I got that friendship invite email and clicked the link to accept the invitation. Note that the link is “I accept the invitation” for both forms of email. And I was surprised and confused when all I say was the Plex home page.
