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.
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.
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.
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.
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.