@kinoCharlino said:
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.
So let me see if I understand this correctly, you spend large amounts of funds, frustration and faith in implementing this new privacy policy over a few attempts knowing that it’s in violation of the upcoming gdpr and change it again in a couple of months to be in compliance?
What’s the reason of this is I may ask politely, to harvest as much data as possible until that time?
By the way, do you know what happens if one remains on pms prior to the 1.9.x version that changed the privacy policy, does it apply then as well or only on versions since the change where the opt out is removed?
@stefanvanruiten, I’m not a lawyer and I can’t speak on behalf of legal. If you have questions or concerns, please reach out to legal. There’s no intention to “harvest as much data as possible.” I’m sure legal can answer in more detail, but my understanding of that is it’s complicated and the privacy policy is a living document, subject to change over time as laws and business need change.
By the way, do you know what happens if one remains on pms prior to the 1.9.x version that changed the privacy policy, does it apply then as well or only on versions since the change where the opt out is removed?
Great question. The policy will be in effect for everyone, regardless of what version of app/server users run. If someone runs an old PMS version, then the PMS will behave/function as that version did. When using an updated client, the client is going to be based off of the Plex account (opt-out) setting.
@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???
We would see a lot more than <5% of the user base in here if that were true.
I have a serious question about this. It has been pointed out by some that several devs, such as @elan , are more frequently seen around Plex’s Reddit pages than around here. What percentage of the base would you say hangs around in Reddit as opposed to here?
Again, that is a legit question that I am genuinely curious about.
ALSO: To the vocally frustrated users here: Please try to be respectful. I undestand that @kinoCharlino does not feel like much more than a name on screen here at which to vent, and it is true that Plex has done plenty of things to draw ire from its users, but let’s try to treat the devs who respond here as real people. A person can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, so to speak.
@chyron8472 said:
I have a serious question about this. It has been pointed out by some that several devs, such as Elan, are more frequently seen around Plex’s Reddit pages than around here. What percentage of the base would you say hangs around in Reddit as opposed to here?
Again, that is a legit question that I am genuinely curious about.
I’ve seen Elan on Reddit and I’ve seen him in here. I don’t think other devs hang out on Reddit more than here, though I don’t have hard numbers on it. Reddit is not part of our official community. This forum is. You should see more devs in here, particularly for beta forums and during launches. In general they’ll be showing more more, though their time is still obviously split more in favor of dev work. Devs are not the only employees who participate in these forums. You’ll find folks from support and project management in here as well.
@kinoCharlino Also, would you not agree that, in many cases, a disgruntled customer would likely quietly grumble about a product or service than openly complain to management about it? I can say for certain than my wife, given a bad experience at a restaurant, is infintely more likely to leave without a word and never come back, rather than to speak to the manager and explain what is bothering her.
I’m not sure you can be sure how many people would like a feature or are upset about a bug if they never bother to tell you. And it doesn’t mean their opinion on such does not exist. Following, it does not mean the forum community is wholly unrepresentative of a significant portion of those ever-silent users simply because you can’t account for their preference either way.
Suffice it to say: just because someone doesn’t complain to you about a bug or a missing feature, that doesn’t mean they do or don’t have an opinion about it. Therefore I don’t see how you can assume they are wholly satisfied simply because they are silent when you relegate the forum community as only representing “<5%” of Plex users.
@chyron8472 said: @kinoCharlino Also, would you not agree that, in many cases, a disgruntled customer would likely quietly grumble about a product or service than openly complain to management about it? I can say for certain than my wife, given a bad experience at a restaurant, is infintely more likely to leave without a word and never come back, rather than to speak to the manager and explain what is bothering her. I’m not sure you can be sure how many people would like a feature or are upset about a bug if they never bother to tell you.
In my experience, I’ve seen both scenarios. My wife would be the same as yours. She would leave quietly. My sister-in-law, on the other hand, would make them well aware of her dissatisfaction. Complete opposite! Having said that, typically (not always) people who have really bad experiences are more motivated to share their bad experience with others than those who had good experiences.
You might be familiar with Net Promoter Score (NPS). it’s a benchmark that helps companies gain a better understanding of the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It’s basically a single-question survey. We’ve administered it to users in the forums (last time when we had a survey about potential paid/premium support options) and also to customers outside the forums. It is entirely possible that some forum users responded to the survey outside the forum. Those are not to specifically exclude the forum community, just to capture a wider perspective of the customer base. Detractors give low scores. They are not thrilled by the product or service, would likely not recommend the service to others, and are much more likely to share their bad experiences with others. Passives are in the middle. They could be swayed in either direction, depending on their experience. They likely wouldn’t spread negative word-of-mouth, but also are not really thrilled about the product or service. At the other end of the scale are the Promoters. They tend to love the company’s the products or services. They are repeat buyers, brand/product evangelists, and are significantly more likely to share their positive experiences with others.
I can’t share specific scores, but I can provide some generalizations. When we’ve surveyed the forum community, our NPS is much lower (more detractors) than the NPS score we get when we survey a much larger portion of our customers. This doesn’t surprise us, as people tend to use the forums to get help, so naturally they’ve got something wrong with the product and thus their experience suffers. But that’s not good either, because NPS indicates users’ overall impressions, it often reflects after-the-fact beliefs of their experience (after they’ve been helped by the company or the community). Higher scores when measuring more customers is good, but we also have to be mindful of how many fall into the Passives portion of the scale. A company ideally wants to push those customers up to become Promoters while reducing the Detractors. Even though the forum community is smaller in numbers, its still a very good reflection of how users can potentially use the platform. And when it comes to advanced usage, the score from the forum matters most. It may be time we refresh these numbers to gain a more updated perspective.
And how often do you run this survey? How do you score people who don’t take it? Do you run it several times for users throughout their lifetime experience with the software? How would you test those who have been using Plex for umpteen years as opposed to new users? How do you know that longtime users don’t dismiss the survey more often than new users?
And how do you know why silent users, who are not “power users”–how do you know why they are not? How do you know what feature or bug they don’t or do experience that does or doesn’t encourage them to then become power users?
EDIT: All I’m really saying is: You glean more information about specific support/features from the forums than from silent users. And despite the forum community only consisting of <5% of the total user base, that doesn’t mean those who are silent would not appreciate full audiobook support, nested collections, or negative filtering for example. And it doesn’t mean fixing rampant crashes by the Windows Store App would not be appreciated by them.
Also, just to be clear, I am not trying to be a jerk. Please read no argumentative or belligerent tone of voice into this.
@kinoCharlino said:
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.
Just because it follows the law, does not mean that it’s right. More than one reseller has learned that the hard way. Many Europeans are quiet happy that they are better protected than most, but it does not mean that they want to hand over their privacy to someone else.
Things are still a bit unclear for me, could someone from Plex clarify if the News piece on the dashboard on client devices is going to be removable or not?
One of my friends that I share my server with called me and asked “what the f*** is this annoying news b******* and how the f*** do I get rid of it. I give two f**** about CNN”. Mostly trying to answer his question, but also agree with him.
@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…
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.
@BigWheel said months ago that a lot of work was being done on the Windows app. When are we likely to see the fruits of this labour? There is a thread on the Windows Store App forum outlining the (growing) list of bugs that are still not fixed.
The problem with using something like Net Promoter Score (NPS) is that those not in the forums are probably not using Plex to it’s full potential. Those in the forums will be using many more features and have a bit more complex setup. This only makes sense because in order to move past the basics you really do need to come here to the forums to get help and feedback on such setups.
So roughly speaking the NPS tells us that those using minimal features are more happy then those who push the system and have more complex setups.
Hence as I say often if Plex to were to concentrate on features being asked for by current “power users” or those here in the forums they would get a higher NPS and of course this would also help with those not in the forum as well.
The overall problem with polls is that there will be people who install it, can’t get it to work easily and will move on and try something else. Some will come to the forums for help but many will just abandon it.
Personally, I’d spend time working on feature that Plex Pass people (paying members) ask for and do polls of non plex pass users to find out what’s missing that they would like. Some of these requests might already be plex-pass feature and many won’t be. Then it’s a matter of making Plex-Pass even more compelling to get more members to buy into it.
To me there are quite a few features that are 85 to 90% done but not usable because the feature wasn’t taken quite far enough to be really useful. Plex just moved on to something else. Negative filtering, optimize, come quickly to mind as well as being able to use basic features when offline without an internet connection (sadly doesn’t work well).
But that’s just me and this is nothing but my very own opinion,
Carlo
@ucjb said:
Just use Emby, it’s a hell of a lot better than Plex.
Not in my opinion overall. It does have some nice features and does do some things better than Plex but overall Plex does many things better than Emby and has far better client support.
Plex can play videos better on remote clients than Emby can especially with ABR. For example Plex can fine tune the use of the pipe to get you the best picture when you are bandwidth constrained. Emby can’t do this with the fined grained detail that Plex can. Plex is also far better at using system resources then Emby. I can stream far more streams on Plex then I can with Emby.
Again I’ve been using both for years and know them both inside and out. Emby is making nice strides but it’s still not in the class that Plex is in. Plex is Varsity and Emby is Junior Varsity. LOL
Depends on your use case. The features you mentioned are not more important to me than the soundness of the original platform, and shady business practices.
Guess its too hard for some to relate, but, I just want to watch my legally purchased media, usually at home…and with Plex, its always an adventure/soap opera with one thing or another.
Emby doesn’t need to do microwave news feeds from Mars that stream to huts in third world endpoints to get me interested, and with every step Plex takes, Emby starts looking more attractive.
@latweek (and really everyone else also) Very true. Every use case is unique. As an illustration: therefore, don’t be upset if a SUV does not do what you want. And really don’t complain to and expect that the SUV manufacture should change the SUV to meet your specific needs (use case). Or complain about that new feature of waving your foot under a door to open it just because you don’t need it.
Instead, get that sedan that does what you want and meets your specific needs.
(The above may come across harsher than I mean it. Sorry for that. It is meant to make us all think.)
@sGarver said: @latweek (and really everyone else also) Very true. Every use case is unique. As an illustration: therefore, don’t be upset if a SUV does not do what you want. And really don’t complain to and expect that the SUV manufacture should change the SUV to meet your specific needs (use case). Or complain about that new feature of waving your foot under a door to open it just because you don’t need it.
Instead, get that sedan that does what you want and meets your specific needs.
(The above may come across harsher than I mean it. Sorry for that. It is meant to make us all think.)
Your analogy made me smile It works, but alas we have much more car models/brands to choose from to deliver a practical choice. It’s not the same in the media world. That said. I will always hang my hat on the fact Plex provides a hell of a lot for such a little price
@sGarver said: @latweek (and really everyone else also) Very true. Every use case is unique. As an illustration: therefore, don’t be upset if a SUV does not do what you want. And really don’t complain to and expect that the SUV manufacture should change the SUV to meet your specific needs (use case). Or complain about that new feature of waving your foot under a door to open it just because you don’t need it.
Instead, get that sedan that does what you want and meets your specific needs.
(The above may come across harsher than I mean it. Sorry for that. It is meant to make us all think.)
A better way of looking at this, is; the SUV manufacturer installs software which could in thory report back what mp3’ you’re playing, or CD’. This “upgrade” was installed without much foresight in a post-Snowdon world, and without anyone asking for it, and was done after you bought the vehical. On top of that, they now add pre-programmed radio stations that can’t be changed… and they’re all Kenny Rogers! They even sometimes play on their own.
@sGarver said: @latweek (and really everyone else also) Very true. Every use case is unique. As an illustration: therefore, don’t be upset if a SUV does not do what you want. And really don’t complain to and expect that the SUV manufacture should change the SUV to meet your specific needs (use case). Or complain about that new feature of waving your foot under a door to open it just because you don’t need it.
Instead, get that sedan that does what you want and meets your specific needs.
(The above may come across harsher than I mean it. Sorry for that. It is meant to make us all think.)
A better way of looking at this, is; the SUV manufacturer installs software which could in thory report back what mp3’ you’re playing, or CD’. This “upgrade” was installed without much foresight in a post-Snowdon world, and without anyone asking for it, and was done after you bought the vehical. On top of that, they now add pre-programmed radio stations that can’t be changed… and they’re all Kenny Rogers! They even sometimes play on their own.
It works, but alas we have much more car models/brands to choose from to deliver a practical choice. It’s not the same in the media world. That said. I will always hang my hat on the fact Plex provides a hell of a lot for such a little price 