Selfhosted

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.

but now a whole bunch of people are going to stay the hell away from OST paid subs

I have a use case similar to OP’s with my father, and was looking at a solution for subtitles. I was looking at their site yesterday. I guarantee you I will stay away from them now.

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.

True. I once considered subscribing, some years ago, but customer reviews of OST convinced me not to. Looks like i made the right decision.

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.

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.

Their Download stats look very sus though. Maybe they process their logs three days late, but that drop does not look pretty.

The space before punctuation thingy is called "Plenken" in Germany and still sometimes used by people who learned on typewriters. Same thing with repeated spaces or dots... to indicate pauses.

But yeah, pretty unprofessional.

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.

Yes, they did give me a refund. But I wouldn't want to do that as doing a chargeback can be incredibly messy for the vendor. I don't want to be petty here.