What's going on with Plex's professionalism lately?

[drzoidberg33]

@d2freak

First, it seemed like an intern had taken over the PMS changelog and release schedule: Plex Media Server - #596 by drzoidberg33 because the build was delayed by over a month (that’s fine, they changed staff) but then, despite that, it was pushed out to stable with a serious breakage bug. And this was caught literally the day after it went into public, but was not caught in the month delay. Very unprofessional. This never happens with Plex, in my experience. So this caused them to pull the release. Again this is exactly a day after it went into public, so most servers already updated. So pulling it seemed like an overreaction, and caused people to start downgrading their servers, which can be damaging to the database. But no note was made of this. Highly unprofessional.

Furthermore, someone put a link in the changelog to read about the issue. It links to a thread with very spurious comments about the problem that caused the release to be pulled, an extremely uninformative thread with no real summary. And to make matters worse, when reading the thread there is an employee spouting internal company struggles and hardships all over the thread, seemingly without reason and in rambling fashion. Extremely unprofessional.

As for this one, firstly apologies about that release and the haphazard communication surrounding it.

This was just one of those perfect storms where we ran into multiple issues one after another. We had also just recently lost some key staff who worked on, and were most familiar, with these parts of the product. It took some time to get new eyes up to speed on these things and address all the issues.

You may have noticed that our release cadence for PMS has slowed down since then, and that is deliberate. We historically have done a new beta release every 2 weeks or so but have since moved away from that schedule and will move forward with a release once a month going forward. These releases will also stay in beta for a longer period.

That experience is really not something any of us want to repeat.

@d2freak

And secondly, now the Web client (very much a core and integral component of Plex) has a breakage problem in the public version also: Music Artist with no album groupings results in an error - regression with 4.121.1 - #5 by JTWMCA

As for this, all I can say is that I reported it internally and I believe the issue has been fixed but is yet to release. I don’t work directly with the web client so I’m not entirely sure when this will release.

I’m about to head off for a week of holiday, thanks for the posting this as we always appreciate it when can get any constructive feedback on what we do here. I didn’t want to get into too much detail here as this is just an informal response before I head out. I hope it answered your questions somewhat at least but I’m happy to go into more detail in the new year.

Happy holidays!