So this isn’t meant to be a post bashing the devs/owner of OpenSubtitles. This is meant simply as awareness.
A few months ago I signed up for the VIP tier at OST ($5/mo for 1000 downloads a day) for a bit to populate my catalogue of videos with subtitles as my father uses my Jellyfin server and he’s lost a lot of his hearing. I also wanted to support the development a bit. At first the service seemed to be downloading a bit, but then it stopped. I waited a few days and it would download at most one or two a day (despite a few thousand videos not having any subtitles). I look around online and found that OST had changed their API and the Jellyfin plugin still needed to catch-up with a newer release. No big deal, so I just waited.
Then the update released which specifically stated that the changes to the API calls were made. I waited a few days, nothing. I uninstalled the OST plugin and reinstalled, still nothing.
So I figured something was wrong either on my end or the server-side, but I didn’t want to bother getting into it. I’ve been planning to rebuild my Jellyfin server with newer hardware with HW acceleration for decoding and encoding. I sent an email to OST support explaining what I’ve been seeing and asked if I could get a refund.
The person who responded asked for logs so that they could help troubleshoot. So I obliged.
They said it wasn’t much help and to get even more logs. Which I provided again.
I even removed over 14 thousand “[query]” lines to make the logs more readable. They said there wasn’t anything there that was useful, and asked me to try again. I indicated that Jellyfin has a scheduled job that checks for missing subtitles and pulls as needed once a day. But I said that at this point I’m just looking for the refund.
A while passes by but then I get a notification that the subscription is going to be renewed again, so I cancelled before that happened and reached out again about the refund. At this point it was more about the principle of the matter as I originally just asked for a refund and that got side-stepped into a support request.
Then I got this as a response:
Which resulted in this:
I waited over two weeks to write this post. I wanted to wait and see if somebody replied back to me with even just an apology or something. If they had originally told me that doing refunds is hassle for them I would have let it go. But telling me off and then deleting my account is just… special. I was astonished at the response and cannot fathom that being the response from any company taking payments for a service.
And I’m not holding a grudge of any kind and I get it, I used to do IT support and some days can be tough dealing with annoying emails. But in my defence all I asked for was a refund because something wasn’t working. In any case, I just wanted to bring this to the attention of the Self-hosting community so that others can make more informed decisions. To be clear, I’m not advocating anyone to pull support. In face I think they should have more support as it’s an invaluable service. Despite the treatment I still plan on getting the VIP subscription again at some point after I rebuild my Jellyfin server. But I also don’t think that customers should be treated like this.
you mentioned it twice so I fear the worst, please tell me you didn’t remove 14000 lines manually using a text editor.
Text editor or not, when you’re asked for log files provide THE LOG FILES. Don’t edit out lines you think are irrelevant. You don’t know what’s irrelevant or not. If you did, you could fix the problem yourself.
Yeah this is one of my pretty peeves.
When I ask you for the logs I don’t mean cut out the one or two lines you might think are relevant.
Please provide the entire log file unless instructed otherwise.
I have no reason to believe the bits OP removed were relevant. In fact it sounds as though none of it was. But that’s not always the case and support people or the actual developers are just as capable of using the search function in a text editor to locate the relevant parts of a log file as anyone else is.
Please provide the entire log, this “helping” concept causes now issues than it solves, trust.
This so much. I have so many users who include a screenshot and cut off parts of the screen. Sometimes the time is relevant, sometimes the URL is relevant, sometimes the web browser is relevant. I get if you have confidential stuff, you can block that out, but leave everything else in.
Sorry, but log files can contain any amount of PII that is absolutely unsuited to be sent over an unencrypted channel to a person/company that should not even need some details.
I sure as hell also skim over logs before I send anything out and remove anything that I don’t want to leak.
What’s wrong with using a text editor to remove lines ? In vim for example :g/pattern/d or :g!/pattern/d with regular expressions is a powerful tool for removing lines in bulk if needed.
Well of course you can do it quickly with vim. Regardless, my suspicion is that OP deleted the lines manually, hence the need to mention it a couple of times. Otherwise, why would they even mention something you can do with grep in a literal second.
I did, because I know they weren’t relevant. They were part of Jellyfin itself and not the plugin. It’s just a warning saying that a database query was slow (12ms). Since I wasn’t doing much on the server for the past few days, half the log was the warning (not an error).
So no, they weren’t part of the problem. I know they aren’t.
Edit: grammar
I get why everyone is jumping on you over this in general, but as someone else with jellyfin, I’ll back you up on this. Jellyfin has too many log entries for slow response it’s insane. Makes the logs barely legible. There is a checkbox to turn off logging those that you might want to consider unchecking.
Oh? I have to take a look when I have a chance. Thanks for mentioning that.
No problem!