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.
Oof. Devs, don’t talk to customers or users like this. Ever. You have no idea what’s actually going on at the other end of the conversation. “Sorry we couldn’t help you,” is all this person needed to say, but now a whole bunch of people are going to stay the hell away from OST paid subs.
I get where you’re coming from, but it could have been a single person having a really bad day. It happens to everyone.
I’m just suggesting you consider that also.
This is exactly why such things need to be addressed and talked about though. Sure, this could be a one off. But if even a single other person has experienced similar, it points to a pattern.
This is why you always have a customer service team. You need a layer of people that can actually have a modicum of respect for the user base between them and the devs, or at least the illusion of it.
There’s some FOSS software I’d be happy to support financially if it weren’t for how rude and unhelpful the devs and their chosen spokespersons are. I won’t name them and start fights, but if you’re here on self hosted, you might have an idea who I’m talking about. I know it’s hard work and they’re doing it for free but the poorly-conceiled contempt for users that have anything to say except “Thanks, your the best” is a very ugly look, and it’s unfortunately pretty common. It’s not endearing, makes me less likely to want to help out.
Just fyi, as a sysadmin, I never want logs tampered with. I import them filter them and the important parts will be analysed no matter how much filller debugging and info level stuff is there.
Same with network captures. Modified pcaps are worse than garbage.
Just include everything.
Sorry you had a bad experience. The customer service side is kind of unrelated to the technical practice side though.
Ya, it’s a good point. I’ve actually never had to deal with a client/customer providing logs before. Aside from one system that I built which would collect everything in the backend and provided a tidy zip file to be emailed. I’m used to getting the logs myself and was trying to be helpful without thinking about that.
Yeah, as someone in a tech job whose primary function is “parsing and interpreting logs” sometimes even the repeated flood of seemingly useless logs can be helpful. If nothing else, they explain why there aren’t any useful logs and that can guide how I respond to the problem.
I can’t remember exactly what it was (Emby?) but I distinctly remember one time having my ticket closed because they scoured the log and found mention of a torrented file. They basically had rules that stated if the logs showed evidence of certain things, they’d outright refuse to assist you. Not sure how common that is though.
Sometimes there’s also just file or directory names I’d rather not reveal. So I’ll do a find/replace with some generic titles. But nothing gets deleted outright.
It’s totally fine to bulk replace some sensitive things like specifically sensitive information with “replace all” as long as it doesn’t break parsing which happens with inconsistency. Like if you have a server named "Lewis-Hamiltons-Dns-sequence“ maybe bulk rename that so is still clear “customer-1112221-appdata”.
But try to differentiate ‘am I ashamed’ or ‘this is sensitive and leaking it would cause either a PII exfiltration risk or security risk’ since only one of these is legitimate.
Note, if I can find that information with dns lookup, and dns scraping, that’s not sensitive. If you’re my customer and you’re hiding your name, that I already invoice, that’s probably only making me suspicious if those logs are even yours.
Why alter the logs? If they want logs, they probably know how to deal with logs.
For $5, I can’t say I’d bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
The support person even said they don’t see any queries in the logs, you’d think that would be a clue to send the logs including queries.
Why alter the logs?
I was trying to be helpful by removing 14k irrelevant lines from a very large, and incredibly verbose, log file.
For $5, I can’t say I’d bother going back and forth with you about how to send a raw log.
This hardly was the issue or point of the post.
That’s not helpful, these are developers… even if you think those lines are useless they can inform the code-path the devs need to trace through or help them understand why you’re facing this issue.
I know how debugging works. I’ve been a developer for a couple decades.
I know for a fact that the lines I removed are normal verbose messages and entirely unrelated to my issue. I know not only because I’m a developer and understand the messages, but also because those lines show up every second of every minute of every day. They are some of the most verbose lines in the logs. The scheduled task for the subtitles only runs once a day and finishes within a few minutes.
Also, they weren’t indicative of any code path because of how frequent they were. At such a high frequency it becomes impossible to determine which line came first in multi-threaded or asynchronous tasks.
You stated that you are a Dev yourself, but then I was expecting that you should have tried to check their API and make the calls with curl, Postman, Insomnia or whatever, but apparently you never tried.
Perhaps the problem was in the third party plugin you were using from the beginning and they cannot really be responsible for that.
I am pretty sure they have monitoring on their API backend and can spot a problem, as I seriously doubt that if the problem was with their API you would be the only one experiencing those problems.
You stated that you are a Dev yourself, but then I was expecting that you should have tried to check their API and make the calls with curl, Postman, Insomnia or whatever, but apparently you never tried.
You’re absolutely right. I didn’t. Because I wasn’t invested in troubleshooting it. I have a full-time job, a family, etc.
The issue here is not about what wasn’t working. The issue here is being told off when simply asking for a refund.
The support person has even acknowledged that my profile was showing no downloads.
I am pretty sure they have monitoring on their API backend and can spot a problem
They are, as evidenced by the screenshot the support person shared showing the number of API calls. And they actually did have a problem with the API, which required an update to the plugin, which is all laid out at the start of my post.
This is partly on you, they asked for logs and you deleted the vast majority of it saying it wasn’t relevant. What if it was? Then when they asked for logs you just shot right to refund.
They’re an ass, but so are you.
Then when they asked for logs you just shot right to refund.
No, I provided logs, twice. Then they ghosted me for almost a month. I’m not complaining, all I did was reply again asking if they could do the refund.
You seem to be missing a hugely important point here. I didn’t want tech support, just a refund. The core tech issue did not matter. They were pushing for logs, and I went along with it. Regardless if the logs I provided were complete or not, I got told off for asking (not demanding) a refund NOT tech support.
Edit: why are you assuming that I deleted the “vast majority” of the log? Where did I mention the total size of the log?
Their Download stats look very sus though. Maybe they process their logs three days late, but that drop does not look pretty.
That drop was from when they had modified their API which required applications using the API to update. That’s actually where my story begins.
Edit: actually I checked my email chat again and it was a “nasty bug” that caused the issue. And I think it was that bug fix which resulted in the API changing.
I don’t know why everyone is giving you shit about modifying log files. That support person was an asshole
