Plex is the most expensive thing I’ve purchased ($150) that has absolutely no guaranteed way of getting support.
If I click on the Plex advocated support options you get:
FAQ & Support Articles
Community Forums / Plex Pass Forums
Billing Questions
I’ve found that unless I get lucky and find someone that has had my issue before, there’s no guarantee I’ll get anything from the forums. I’ve posted various times now about issues/bugs I’ve found and they get a few views, but generally nobody responds and things never get resolved.
I’ve purchased things for $20 where I’ve been able to e-mail or call technical support. Here I’ve paid $150 and I’m stuck posting about bugs that never get looked at or answered.
I couldn’t be more disappointed. Shame on you Plex team.
To add to @ChuckPa, we try to get to every thread but can’t always respond to all of them or we just miss them. A nudge can be helpful. l’ve gone ahead and responded to some of your recent posts.
@Reed97123 there are many power users here in the forums as well as Plex Ninjas and Plex Employess who will go out of there way to help you if we can.
All you need to do is ask a reasonable question and we will help if possible! Many of us will try and help you. I often PM people with my phone number and suggest a call to help you if it’s to complex to write here in the forums. This could enable one on one conversation or remote login to your computer to help. Many other vets will do the same. But keep in mind the forums are the primary way to correspond because it’s searchable and can be used by multiple people! (when answers are given).
So don’t hesitate to ask questions and many of us our here to help!
I had somewhere around 6 posts/questions that had a few views but no posts. Obviously less now that I posted this.
I appreciate everyone that has now looked at them today, but I’m still wondering how to get support in the future without going to the nuclear option to get attention.
I then followed it up with several posts pleading for it to be looked at or commented on, only to give up getting it addressed a month later because of lack of response. I spent a lot of time collecting what Plex said was needed for them to look at it. I ended up thinking, “Why did I go to the trouble when they didn’t even look at it?”
There’s no guarantee posts will be addressed, and that might be okay if the addressed to total submitted was high, but I was finding most of my posts never had a single post.
Hard links are bear. PMS uses the kernel’s iNotify event mechanism. If you have directory A hard linked to directory B, add/remove/modify anything in directory B, with a PMS library looking at directory A, PMS will not see it. That’s how iNotify works. The iNotify event will go to the inode for B, not A.
The same thing happens when modifying a file/directory on the NAS side of a NFS mount. When done “behind the kernel’s back”, PMS will never know.
For the Permissions issue I’ve started using a workaround of using chmod in a cron job, like a few other users who posted about it later are doing as well. This should be addressed IMO.
For the iNotify issue I started using a workaround. I run the Plex Media Scanner on the directories I create the links for. I accept that this is probably a limitation of the OS and need not be addressed further.
If you have inotify enabled for the directories containing the links, given the default max iNotify watches is stupidly small, have you increased them?
@Reed97123 said:
For the iNotify issue I started using a workaround. I run the Plex Media Scanner on the directories I create the links for. I accept that this is probably a limitation of the OS and need not be addressed further.
I’m not looking for any further resolution with iNotify, as mentioned above.
It’s kind of hard to disagree with the OP here. I’ve been around for several years. In that time I’ve posted a fair number of requests for help. Sometimes I get help right away, sometimes I have to “nudge” several times, and occasionally I have to scream at someone. The bottom line is, when I post a request for help, my confidence that I will get a response is pretty low.
I realize that this is an inherent problem with an informally-monitored forum. It’s easy to miss things. But that’s the point, really. I wouldn’t advocate closing the forums, as peer support is very valuable. But, for actual, formal support, perhaps it’s time to move to a more reliable system that minimizes requests being “missed.”
@beckfield I have to disagree with you and OP… I’ve found others in the forum to be most helpful, and knowing how to use the search box is invaluable… This alone has solved 90% of any beginner issues…
For the other 10%, @ChuckPa and @OttoKerner seems to be dedicated support line going through the forums and offering help and insight into issues, they have personally helped me with the most mundane issues that drove me nuts…
I’m sure there are others that I will find out about in future cases, but Plex has obviously put those people in place in the forum to specifically help those who request it… I agree with the mentality of it, make requests visible, make it searchable and available to the masses and deal with new issues/bugs as they come and have them visible as well…
Yes I agree that paying for something has a certain expectation of support, but Plex nowhere states that you will be supported with white gloves and given a phone call within 30 seconds of complaining about not liking the poster it picked (over-dramatisation)… Sometime ■■■■ happens, sometimes people need to be reminded of stuff… It’s not a case of you being ignored for no reason… Guaranteed if you phone Samsung helpline now, you will be sitting in a queue waiting for someone to help you…
Also, if you feel you are truly not being helped in a topic, feel free to add the members I listed above directly into the conversation and see how far you get…
@GoingGaGa : Your first statement seems to accuse that we hadn’t even tried to do a simple search to solve our problem, which isn’t the case. In most cases I spend nearly 1-2 hours searching Plex/Web and trying different solutions I encounter before I’d consider posting a question.
2nd, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on our opinion of how we’ve been supported in the past and what our expectations are for something we paid $150 for. Before posting this topic I had about 6 issues that I had posted about asking for help that hadn’t had a single post on. So my experience has been different than your experience if you’ve been getting all the help you’ve required.
I don’t need a support telephone number if I have some way to escalate the topic in the forums if it doesn’t get any attention. I even don’t mind waiting for a week or so if things are particularly busy. However, what I can’t stomach is that I post questions and nothing I do can get anyone to respond/post in the topic. That I think is outside my expectations for something I paid for and is certainly out of line with other things purchased for similar costs.
@GoingGaGa said: @beckfield I have to disagree with you and OP… I’ve found others in the forum to be most helpful, and knowing how to use the search box is invaluable… This alone has solved 90% of any beginner issues…
I agree, everybody’s very helpful when they respond. But, as I said, it’s just too easy, and too common, for threads to be missed. I’m pretty good at searching. When I post a request for help, it’s usually because I’m to the point where I need to. I’m certainly not perfect. My searches have missed solutions, and I’ve occasionally been lazy. But I’m also intelligent enough to not count those instances when I consider the level and consistency of support I’ve encountered here. I’m talking about posts that went for weeks or months without response, even after half a dozen bumps.
I have, on occasion, added Ninjas or Plex employees to conversations in an attempt to get a response, usually with no apparent effect. I can’t say whether I’ve specifically called on Otto or Chuck in this way, but others, certainly.
I’m not one of those saying “Dammit, I paid for this, where’s the support?” It doesn’t matter to me if I paid for it or not. My early career was as a telephone tech support rep, and I worked for a company that enjoyed a very good reputation for the level and consistency of support they provided (this was back in the day when publications like PC Magazine actually made calls to the tech support lines, and included this experience in their reviews of software packages). As far as I’m concerned, a company’s commitment to support is just as important to their reputation as the quality of their product.
I’m also not interested in making a big issue out of this. I’m just offering my opinion that it may be time to step up on the support side a bit.
Getting a truly official response from Plex is next to impossible not matter what is asked. However the ninjas and more experienced users and even some of the less experienced users almost always do respond to posts. Particularly those with decent titles and decent descriptions of the problem/question.
So far I have had no question I have asked that I considered truly important fail to get a quick, and usually, accurate, response.
But as a disclaimer I run my Plex server under Windows (the widest used operating system) and I use clients, mostly, that are also among the widest used so my question are usually able to be answered by a large number of folks.
I also have a pretty good knowledge base of my own and I rarely have to ask questions that I cannot lay out thoroughly and, mostly, give exact steps to reproduce. Often when I see problems that are not responded to the title and/or body of the question is not particularly informative.
While it should be that every post that is either a question or a problem gets a response, even if it is only asking for more information, the fact is that this board moves so fast at times that missing one that does not catch the eye right away is understandable.
There is also the RTFM issue. While Plex dose not have a “manual” it does have some very helpful and informative help pages. Also 99% (maybe more) of the post with problems have been answered before and even half way decent searching skills and/or spending a little time would find the answer without the need for answering question.
Lastly, and I have no real idea how to fix this, the Plex Pass info leads many people to “expect” that a Plex Pass is somehow tied to enhanced support. It is not. Maybe Plex needs to somehow enhance the Plex Pass sales page(s) so that EXACTLY what a Plex Pass does and doesn’t do is spelled out better and thereby reducing misunderstandings.
@Elijah_Baley said:
Lastly, and I have no real idea how to fix this, the Plex Pass info leads many people to “expect” that a Plex Pass is somehow tied to enhanced support. It is not. Maybe Plex needs to somehow enhance the Plex Pass sales page(s) so that EXACTLY what a Plex Pass does and doesn’t do is spelled out better and thereby reducing misunderstandings.
I believe this would be very helpful for anyone buying a PlexPass.
Maybe @ChuckPa can let the powers that be inform the web devs to make a point of it on the sales page? Also, Chuck, is it possible to tag a Stickie in the forum for support detailing escalation procedures with clearly defined guidelines on how to escalate if needed?
I have not accused anyone of not being able to search, was just my opinion that search solved most of my issues (including creating some fun new ones)… the FAQ is also a great resource and I’ve even used it myself to prove my points inside support requests…
let’s wait and hear what the ninjas have to say, and in advance thanks to them
Thanks everyone for your thoughts. Truly this community is amazing, as evident by the responses here from some long-time power users. Feedback is certainly welcome, and I have to say I am happy to see such a helpful thread discussing customer support (something near and dear to me). We are appreciative of the Ninjas’ and power users’ technical mastery and efforts they contribute to our community. Plex employs a small, but vigilant CS team. You may have seen some of them in here, while others focus on other areas.
The CS team has a common goal of leveling up Plex’s support and what we read in this thread and other threads is taken to heart and discussed as a team. Because of our size and in keeping Plex Pass subscription prices as lean as possible, we have to be smart about the approaches we take in providing support. While we’re not big enough to have a call center, we have put our focus on strengthening “self-help” and community support. Improving the Knowledge base content and searchability has been, and continues to be, a spotlight area for us. Likewise, building tighter collaborations with the Ninjas and improving that program is a key focus. We are exploring different ways we can provide support in the future, including traditional and non-traditional methods. While I can’t speak to any specific yet, know that improving customer support is important to us.
Now that Plex is a such a commercial success and not a hobby project, it might be time to open up a trouble ticket system for paying customers (PlexPass) so they can get web based support. There are good, open source, inexpensive options that could be used AND would also be a great tool for developers to find, document, track, and correct issues…especially in Betas like all of us PlexPass customers are trying to help with testing for the general population of users.
Just my two cents, but as a software support person myself I find that having a good trouble ticketing system is one of my most valuable tools.
