@Dion250 said:
This is great news… I am guessing this feature isn’t live yet. But thank you.
No, sorry it is not live just yet. Coming very soon, though.
@kinoCharlino said:
@stefanvanruiten said:
@Dion250 said:
I wrote that. On October 5th I used the term hide in this comment. Later the same day I clarified by writing that users will be able to enable/disable the feature in this comment, which was a reply to you.
Sorry to bug in, but the main problem with Plex is that “fantastic” new features are being added without the uses being able to disable them - until people start screaming at the plex team. Then the new feature will get the option to be hidden in some unspecific future release.
And with problems are still being seen both in the players and also the different versions of the PMS one must wonder why so much time is being spend on new features …
I for one have switched off my plex container, and switched 100% to Emby … after so many years with a sometimes non-functional product I’ve given up.
@casperghst42 said:
Sorry to bug in, but the main problem with Plex is that “fantastic” new features are being added without the uses being able to disable them - until people start screaming at the plex team. Then the new feature will get the option to be hidden in some unspecific future release.And with problems are still being seen both in the players and also the different versions of the PMS one must wonder why so much time is being spend on new features …
No problem, hopefully I can bring some clarity to this. I’m not sure why the ability to enable/disable News was not included with the initial v1 launch. I’m looking into that, though typical for software dev is to have critical issues and major user requests addressed in a fast follow update that didn’t make codec lock for the release. The forum spoke loud and clear, and this is part of the upcoming fast follow release.
Developing new features alongside fixing current issues is a balancing act that all companies have to make, and I’m sure there is a business/growth reason behind it. We continue to have developers work on crushing bugs across all platforms we support. I agree that we could do better at this balancing act and it’s feedback we’ve given to engineering. There has been considerable talk internally about this and dedicating more dev resources to fixing bugs.
@kinoCharlino said:
There has been considerable talk internally about this and dedicating more dev resources to fixing bugs.
Do you even realize how cynical this sounds to us users???
To make it plain and simple to you: as of 12.10.2017 Plex is barely usable for us, your users … who pay the bill!!!
Finished that last sentence for you 
@kinoCharlino said:
There has been considerable talk internally about this and dedicating more dev resources to fixing bugs, but in the end, we decided to just crack on with developing new features no one really wants, launching them when they’re 80% complete, milking as much revenue from our user base as possible, and repeating…
@marcelhehle said:
@kinoCharlino said:
There has been considerable talk internally about this and dedicating more dev resources to fixing bugs.Do you even realize how cynical this sounds to us users???
Would you prefer we not discuss user feedback from the forums internally? We’re in the process of getting more dev resources on fixing bugs. I didn’t say we have gone and done it already.
To make it plain and simple to you: as of 12.10.2017 Plex is barely usable for us, your users … who pay the bill!!!
You make it sound like Plex is not working for everyone. I find that hard to believe. We would see a lot more than <5% of the user base in here if that were true.
@adrianwi said:
Finished that last sentence for you@kinoCharlino said:
There has been considerable talk internally about this and dedicating more dev resources to fixing bugs, but in the end, we decided to just crack on with developing new features no one really wants, launching them when they’re 80% complete, milking as much revenue from our user base as possible, and repeating…
but in the end… the discussions are very recent. I clarified that point in my previous comment.
@adrianwi said:
Finished that last sentence for you
We finally have someone active in the forums that can speak to us about plex and what is maybe happening behind the scenes, something we have not had before!
Post like these will not help the cause moving forward…
@“- NaDs” said:
@adrianwi said:
Finished that last sentence for youWe finally have someone active in the forums that can speak to us about plex and what is maybe happening behind the scenes, something we have not had before!
Post like these will not help the cause moving forward…
Thank you. I appreciate that. @BigWheel and I are trying hard to provide as much info and background as we can. We’re both born from the community and big users of Plex – so we push the boundaries of what we can share. Some details we can’t get into because of business reasons, but wherever possible we’re working toward providing more information to gain user insights and increase understanding.
News is a big new feature for us, and for sure there will be many users who don’t want to use it. There will also be many users who look to get legit 3rd party content to help supplement their own media collection. News is for them. I assure you, the option to disable News if you don’t want to see it is coming very soon.
@kinoCharlino, thanks for taking the time to engage and respond to our concerns about this. Please don’t let the vocal minority convince you that it’s not worth the time or effort.
I’ve expressed my fair share of frustration over some of the recent policy changes and apparent focus of development at present, but I very much appreciate any feedback we can get from Plex, so I wanted to thank you for not only posting a response, but posting a response that speaks to our concerns.
@kinoCharlino said:
@“- NaDs” said:
@adrianwi said:
Finished that last sentence for youWe finally have someone active in the forums that can speak to us about plex and what is maybe happening behind the scenes, something we have not had before!
Post like these will not help the cause moving forward…
Thank you. I appreciate that. @BigWheel and I are trying hard to provide as much info and background as we can. We’re both born from the community and big users of Plex – so we push the boundaries of what we can share. Some details we can’t get into because of business reasons, but wherever possible we’re working toward providing more information to gain user insights and increase understanding.
News is a big new feature for us, and for sure there will be many users who don’t want to use it. There will also be many users who look to get legit 3rd party content to help supplement their own media collection. News is for them. I assure you, the option to disable News if you don’t want to see it is coming very soon.
Thank you for posting, I feel a lot of user frustration would change if more time was dedicated to the forums. take the plex pass forums it’s for paid users but the lack of support from plex staff is pitiful.
Plex for me has worked good but I feel when there is an issue you’re left out to dust for a reply.
@“- NaDs” said:
@adrianwi said:
Finished that last sentence for youWe finally have someone active in the forums that can speak to us about plex and what is maybe happening behind the scenes, something we have not had before!
Post like these will not help the cause moving forward…
… so you consider that it’s good, that now we get to hear that the forum represents only about 5% of the user-base and that the complaints here are “hard to believe”???
kinoCharlino, your Power Users are unhappy. They have been complaining for months and have been completely ignored by the Plex team. So far most of the feedback coming from the Plex team was rather unhelpful. Furthermore the situation has become so bad that those 5% of users started to share openly their experiences of moving from Plex to Emby.
Again, you can think of “the 5%” whatever you like. Just acknowledge that it’s you Power Users, your core supporters, your evangelists. You lied to them, you tried to shove changes down their throat they don’t like, you delivered unfinished features to them and didn’t fix the bugs they were complaining about … but then again, it’s just 5% of the user base. So let’s continue with the News feature, the crappy UX and all those nice data gathering features.
Excuse me, but please just speak for yourself.
Not all users in this forum switch to Emby or think about doing so.
How do you spell “drama queen” in plexish?
@marcelhehle, I’m not going to continue arguing with you as I don’t find it a useful use of my time. There are other threads I could be focusing on. I will make some brief comments on what you said and move on from this thread, as I have answered the questions regarding enabling/disabling the News feature already.
@marcelhehle said:
… so you consider that it’s good, that now we get to hear that the forum represents only about 5% of the user-base and that the complaints here are “hard to believe”???
I said your one comment about how Plex doesn’t work for everyone is hard to believe, not that all complaints here are hard to believe. You can scroll back up and read that for your self. I can’t help you if you choose to misinterpret that.
kinoCharlino, your Power Users are unhappy. They have been complaining for months and have been completely ignored by the Plex team.
I see that many power users are unhappy and they come to discuss that in the forums. That’s what this place is for. They haven’t been ignored. I described in an earlier post in this thread a few things we have done recently because of power user feedback. We can and do continue to work on fixes that users report in this forum. We can’t fix things overnight, but that is the nature of software development. Some things take longer to fix. Some things have a greater need to be fixed, others have a lesser need to be fixed. What we have tried to do a lot more recently is provide acknowledgement in threads on issues and provide info on them where possible, as we collect additional information to further reproduce, diagnose, root cause, and resolve issues. Unfortunately we don’t have the capacity to reply to every single thread, but we’ve been working on improvements in that area.
So far most of the feedback coming from the Plex team was rather unhelpful. Furthermore the situation has become so bad that those 5% of users started to share openly their experiences of moving from Plex to Emby.
This is an open community where people are free to share their experiences, as long as they follow our community guidelines. We haven’t censored users for discussing other options or 3rd party software. That metric represents the entire forum community, so when everyone here writes posts like you suggest, then 5% will be talking about moving. Point being, lets just keep things in perspective.
Again, you can think of “the 5%” whatever you like. Just acknowledge that it’s you Power Users, your core supporters, your evangelists. You lied to them, you tried to shove changes down their throat they don’t like, you delivered unfinished features to them and didn’t fix the bugs they were complaining about … but then again, it’s just 5% of the user base. So let’s continue with the News feature, the crappy UX and all those nice data gathering features.
I can see responding to this leading us into circles, as it appears you are firmly set into your beliefs on this. Simply put, not all features are for the power users, but many are. We do not require your permission to release a feature or a design change intended for the 95%. That is ludicrous and not sound business. We take power user feedback into consideration as members of the community. Much feedback from power users has been applied over the years. Not everything. We have shown that we can and do adjust when something is just not right for users, though we cannot meet all user requests or demands.
@soupynj said:
Thank you for posting, I feel a lot of user frustration would change if more time was dedicated to the forums. take the plex pass forums it’s for paid users but the lack of support from plex staff is pitiful.Plex for me has worked good but I feel when there is an issue you’re left out to dust for a reply.
I completely understand the frustration and agree we need to continue improving in this area. I’m hoping some recent changes will be felt, and we’ve got more things with regard to support coming that we hope will help get users the support they need, whether its in the forums or in other places.
@fecaleagle said:
@kinoCharlino, thanks for taking the time to engage and respond to our concerns about this. Please don’t let the vocal minority convince you that it’s not worth the time or effort.I’ve expressed my fair share of frustration over some of the recent policy changes and apparent focus of development at present, but I very much appreciate any feedback we can get from Plex, so I wanted to thank you for not only posting a response, but posting a response that speaks to our concerns.
I’m glad to help. Hope we can keep things civil and constructive in the forums.
@kinoCharlino said:
@soupynj said:
Thank you for posting, I feel a lot of user frustration would change if more time was dedicated to the forums. take the plex pass forums it’s for paid users but the lack of support from plex staff is pitiful.Plex for me has worked good but I feel when there is an issue you’re left out to dust for a reply.
I completely understand the frustration and agree we need to continue improving in this area. I’m hoping some recent changes will be felt, and we’ve got more things with regard to support coming that we hope will help get users the support they need, whether its in the forums or in other places.
That is good news, I too feel frustrated at times that for real interaction, Reddit was the only place to get that lately. I hope this trend stays and in more boards (hint: Plex Cloud) too.
@per_PLEX_ed said:
That is good news, I too feel frustrated at times that for real interaction, Reddit was the only place to get that lately. I hope this trend stays and in more boards (hint: Plex Cloud) too.
Hint received loud and clear! I’ve been in talks with the cloud team to get a customer communication update out in the cloud forum. Something with good detail on the core issues. The cloud team is knee-deep on lots of performance work. Some of it has already been implemented in the background (not requiring a PMS release), while more is still to come. I’m hoping to get you guys an update on what’s happening behind the scenes soon.
@rossinior said:
Excuse me, but please just speak for yourself.
Not all users in this forum switch to Emby or think about doing so.How do you spell “drama queen” in plexish?
I thought long if should even reply … but hell, yes: I am a drama queen!
I’m a drama queen because …
- Plex changed their privacy policy into something that’s close to illegal in my country now and will be illegal next spring.
- Non of my clients currently is without bugs or other severe annoyances (Linux PMS, iOS, tvOS, PMP on macOS and Linux … I’m running quite a bit of a setup here). It starts with plain and obvious bugs, like cloud sync that NEVER EVER since about 2 years worked reliably for me and ends with really terrible UX designs. Not to mention the drama that PMP is … since about 2 years PMP is just a shadow of what Home Theatre was.
- Instead of fixing those bugs, we get new features … nobody want or needs. Even worse, those features - News for example - are ruining the experience for a lot of us users. And let’s be clear: that didn’t come as a surprise! I don’t buy it that the Plex team tried to implement “something great”. They new upfront what clusterfuck this would be, but they wanted to get the money that comes with it.
- We are being ignored by the dev team. All of the above mentioned annoyances have been raised loud and clear in the forum; sometimes since months. Mostly without any reply from the Plex team.
- Furthermore the need for a professional communications officer has been raised not once, but several times from a lot of users who again loud and clear pointed out that the communication coming from Plex is not good enough.
- … and still in this thread I get to read that all those complaining are just “about 5%” of the user base. So, not only is the Plex team in full denial of the situation … they are actively making it worse by giving unprofessional feedback: “you’re a minority. Shut up, your’re not important enough!”. Again: a communications function is really necessary for Plex because to current situation is unbearable.
And so on, and so on. Now need to make the list even longer.
But what really pisses me of is that all the time this situation was bad. Since this August, it’s a tragedy: within 2-3 months Plex tries to shove down our throats 2 major changes and both time is somehow “completely surprised” on how badly this is received here in the forum. Both times their communications is as expected: making things rather worse than better and both times we get some excuses while the team carries on with their journey right into the dead end road. In the meantime PMP for example doesn’t have a search function any more and Cloud Sync is completely broken.
And yes, that’s the reason I’m a Drama Queen. I’m completely overreacting, because I don’t want to deal with all those bugs and GUI-changes any more without seeing any real improvement or at least honest feedback from the Plex team …
@marcelhehle, I’ve made it clear that despite the power user base being the minority, it is still very important to us and we have and continue to implement feedback we’ve received here. Not all feedback can get implemented for various reasons.
Plex changed their privacy policy into something that’s close to illegal in my country now and will be illegal next spring.
The new privacy policy meets current European laws. We’re well aware of the changes coming to EU laws and have full intention of being in compliance by the time it is required of us to be.
