Again… you’re mixing those 2 things up:
Every regular account has a username – if you haven’t assigned one, Plex probably used your e-mail address as such. Managed users have a username too… though it seems those are only unique in your home. Nothing about that has changed – except Plex now seems to apply dedicated user names to all (I guess in order to avoid all those e-mail addresses flying around as user names).
The discussion about visibility was referring to the user profile’s full name / nick names (not the username).
probably some good feedback to avoid such confusion
The full name is a friendly name. So you can have Bob or whatever you want displayed when you give access to your server or what shows up in the user switcher of your Plex home. So folks know who you are instead of having to remember who Dokuro is.
I’ll let folks know the wording of description is confusing
I’m not totally sure what you mean by “internal” accounts but managed users are not and have never been local to a server or part of your Plex account.
They are separate accounts at plex.tv. which are just linked to your Plex account as the Home Admin. They have no email or unique username. They essentially are just a friendly name (which is why they can be mostly anything) and an account number. They are linked to your account in the sense those accounts have a few special rules in that no one else can give access to their server to them but the home admin who created them
Only accounts which had their email as their username were changed. Managed accounts do not and have never had emails.
The new Full name in your profile is so you can change the visibility of your Plex account when you give access to others and what shows in the user picker. Unlike a username It does not need to be unique. You could have the full name just say “Dad” (as was asked in this feature request [Implemented] Alias instead of plex.tv usernames )
The forum software does not have the concept of a “friendly name” unfortunately that is why forum username needs to be unique. The forum will update wit your Plex account username which is one of the reason we forced the change of it being an email with @ removed. We do allow users to change the forum user name to something else (you can do so at https://forums.plex.tv/my/preferences/account ). If you change your forum username then updating your Plex account username should not change the forum username
@tom80H not mixing them up at all, you have the plex account and then later, they introduced managed users, which are essentially sub-users of the plex account and require the plex account to be logged into the server in order to use.
managed accounts are not public-facing and cannot be used to login in to the plex server.
I only want the email of the plex (admin) account to be used as an identity on the plex server, and if I HAVE to use one (a username that is), I want to use one of my choosing as it is only linked to MY plex server, not for public consumption and the uniqueness should not be a factor here, it is not supposed to be a public account.
Also to go along with above reply. I believe the ability for a managed account to edit their name was a mistake should not be there. It is a bug that editing show up at all when the managed user is signed in which I will report.
Only the Home Admin should be able to alter the name of a managed account
@BigWheel thanks for the reply, but I don’t think my main point has been addressed… why is the username public? Why not just have the registered email address and the “Full Name”
I think this is perhaps a legacy issue, as managed accounts only became a thing later, but I (and most people I would imagine) used the account they logged in to the plex server with to consume the media. And now, I am being told that the username I want on my own server is not available on my own network because some random person on the internet already has it.
Ideally now, I would want to create a random username for the admin account and transfer my viewing history etc. over to a new managed account I would login into on all my devices, but this is not possible as far as I know?
It doesn’t need to be public. If you post here on this forum we need to display something but as i mentioned above you can change it on forum
This has always been the case with usernames. It is not new. Usernames can be used for login and need to be unique. As I mentioned above accounts are not and have never been local to server. Though obviously the server does save that with the view history.
@BigWheel Right, I understand your points, I think it should still be a choice as to how my admin account is displayed on my server.
I never really understood the reason of logging into a local server with a cloud-connected account (outside of the obvious; Plex wanting to harvest data) and it looks like my youthful naivety 10+ years ago has now taken its revenge!
So, I will have to bite the bullet, rename my plex account to a random string and setup a new managed user for myself to use on the clients (losing all that watched history, progress etc.).
that is what the new “full name” is for. it is a friendly name that other can see. As I mentioned you could have that just say “Dad” as it does not need to be unique so your family/friends don’t need to know who “medianode” is.
If you share with me for example and I have my own server and my own friends I share my sever with, we don’t create a whole new separate account on your server so you can also give me access to your server. That is why a person can have access to multiple servers from multiple people with only one account. You can also be the admin if multiple servers (i have three) with the same Plex account
technically when you start typing in the field to give access to your server it does populate and put a check mark if a username with an exact match exists. So someone could just sit there filling out usernames to see if it is real but other wise it would just error an they could figure out if real that reverse way
@BigWheel thanks for all the info thus far, it is much appreciated.
I think I will follow security best practices (as far as is currently possible) with all the information provided and segregate duties as I explained earlier (follow an RBAC model of sorts).
I will rename my username to a random, less discoverable string.
Use this only as an “admin” account on the Plex Server
Create a new managed user to join my other managed users as a way to consume content through the Plex clients.
Continue using a PIN to further secure access to the “Admin” account
I am still not a fan of the way this was implemented, and there was an opportunity to expand on the relationship and separation of User/Admin roles, as well as adding a data portability element of user data (that I think is sorely missing for a product of this kind). But those are topics for another thread I suppose.
I also think that the library sharing methods could be overhauled to not require you provide discoverable data to share libraries with friends, implementing an OTP or a generated connection string would be more secure.
Security should be front and center at Plex as you are exposing our internal infrastructure to the internet, when technically, it is not a requirement for the functionality of most of the main components (playing locally hosted media content).
The Help people discover your account ... is misleading based on your input here so thanks for that and for bringing it back to the team to have reworked.
So, today I noticed that some of the users I’m sharing with had changed their names. Now, instead of their email, which I recognized, they use a handle which forces me to guess who they are
This brings me to something that’s been requested since the new implementation of nicknames for users in the mobile app: Please, please let us edit those from within the web interface. Who uses the mobile app for management???
app.plex.tv was updated was on Wednesday before we started updating those username. The Full Name ( aka Friendly/Display name) can be done on the account page https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/account
You cannot change other regular accounts username or Full Name though. Regular accounts need to do it themselves when signed into the web or mobile apps.
I don’t understand what is happening here. I got the email saying Plex was creating a username but I have always had, and logged on with, a username. This username stills works fine too, despite the email suggesting they were creating a different username because I didn’t have one. So the email seems to be a lie on every level. Confused.
What do you mean? I have one account with that email address and i can logon with either username or email address. The email suggests i did not have a username. I clearly do. Its what I log on with.
The email saying I did not have a username was sent to that email address. I am claiming the email is a lie because it is. This is not directed at a person - its directed at an email that is provably false. Its probably some automation gone wrong. You really are not helping with this attitude. My post was about my confusion - not a personal attack on you or Plex.
