I know, that was just a sarcastic joke about it not being a properly detailed bug report.
Then the scenario I outlined may no longer apply. That happened to me long ago, at which point I unpinned the ad-supported source and forgot about it.
I’ll try pinning it again and if anything interesting happens I will try to capture the details.
Clearly, there is at least confusing UX somewhere as we see posts like this several times a week.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say “several times a week” but it’s definitely more common than it should be.
I’ve also asked about the support pages and the plans for beefing them up to avoid future confusion as well.
Correct and having View State Sync enabled adds another layer by syncing the watch state of PMS content with our VOD and Discover services. So as mentioned above in this thread, if the content exists on both PMS and VOD AND both sources are pinned AND View State Sync is enabled, we get more confusion.
A couple things to note:
This seems to only happen with Shows
Web/Desktop seems to be the worst at handling this in some cases
Other clients will show 2 items, one PMS and one VOD item in Continue Watching
On any client, selecting the VOD item and using the Remove from Continue Watching will remove it from Continue Watching and the PMS item will remain.
This issue seems to come up every now and again, we should definitely be fixing it. Thanks for all the discussion and reporting here. I think we have a clearer picture of the issue and the frustration it’s causing. Issue is written and I’ll continue to monitor it’s progress. Thank you again for reporting. My apologies for the confusion.
I think it’s great if you can fix the specific confluence of events that leads to this problem – it seems to be the single most common complaint here and on unofficial support channels like the subreddit and frankly it’s annoying to see conspiracy theorists who are clearly running into this issue but insist it’s part of some malevolent conspiracy to infiltrate their personal content.
… But I think the actual underlying problem is that there are a small subset of users who really, really, really, really, honestly, not lying, not fibbing, not making it up, really don’t want to watch VOD content and instead use Plex for local media. And Plex’s basic response to that is “actually, most of Plex’s 11 trillion 408 billion users watch VOD, there are billboards, Drew Carey, 99.9999% of all Plex revenue is from ads, the stats don’t lie, people love Plex VOD”. I am sure this is true! I believe it! But it’s is not really a response to the user story being presented.
The more effort that’s put into sophisticated ways to cater to the VOD+local media customers, the more weird edge cases like this that there are for the local media only customer. (And none of this stuff affects the very real hundred quintillion people that never use local media at all and only use VOD)
Beyond coming to terms with the basic design tension inherent in this situation – and maybe trying to make it easier to be a local media only user – I think maybe a quick fix would be to add a clear UI overlay to the VOD ads that says “You are seeing this ad because you are watching on Plex’s free video-on-demand offering”.
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