So far I haven’t seen any attempts to change their user agents. I’ve seen one or two other bots poking around, but nothing to write home about so I’ve left them alone.

I have heard however that changing user agents is a tactic they do indeed employ, especially Claude, so it may be that I’ll eventually have to adapt my defenses.

I’ve been fending off AI bots the last week or so; wrote about it here:

https://gerowen.substack.com/p/the-ai-data-scraping-is-getting-out

I’m not sure. I’ve only noticed it on my TV and have even noticed it with content that I personally ripped from DVDs or Blurays and encoded to x265 or AV1. Since it only affects the TV apps I’m wondering if it isn’t a lack of support for some color space or something by the TV hardware because when I’m encoding I don’t usually change anything about the dimensions, color space, frame-rate, etc., just the codec and quality. If the video is 10 bit, I encode it as 10 bit. If it’s HDR, I pass that thru. I’ve checked with the mobile and desktop app and the web player on content the TVs had issues with and those same files played fine everywhere else, so it’s something specific to the LG and Roku apps for Plex.

I do my own ripping direct from disc and I’ve still seen it happen. So far it’s exclusive to the TV apps so I think it’s something to do with the lack of hardware support for certain things.

Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.

The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.

I’m on my laptop so I thought I would elaborate on my first comment to give you things to watch out for if/when you update. I’ve been hosting mine with the zip file manually installed with my own Apache/PHP/MySQL/MariaDB setup for ages now without issue. It’s been rock solid except for, like I said, the occasional changes required to take advantage of new features such as adding new indices to the database or installing an additional php addon. Here’s the things that I noticed with updating to 28.

• The 3 dot/ellipses menu was missing in the web interface and was replaced with dedicated buttons for “Download”, “Add to Favorites” and “Delete”. Shift clicking was also broken. This meant that when I, for example, take a lot of photos for a holiday, I can’t use the web interface to select a large range of multiple files and then move them all from “InstantUpload” into a more permanent album. I either had to use the mobile app, or do them one at a time. The ellipses menu, along with the options to bulk “move/copy” have been added back since then with the *.1 update, but shift clicking in the web interface to select a range of files is still broken.
• The “Retention” app, which is listed as a “Featured” app doesn’t function any more. I used it to automatically delete backups of my Signal messenger, files in the “InstantUpload” folder that were over a year old, etc. You can enable it, but it doesn’t actually work and just throws errors in the log file, which is now reported in the “Overview” portion of the “Administration” page with a note of “X number of errors since somedate”, and prevents you getting the green checkmark. It’s probably safe to assume that other apps will also have issues because I had half a dozen get automatically disabled with the update.
• Occasionally when I use the web interface to move or copy a file, I’ll get an error message that the operation failed. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it’s not and the operation actually succeeded. If it ends up being true and the move did actually fail, doing it again results in a successful move.

It seems like they’ve made some substantial under-the-hood changes to the user interface that shouldn’t have been shipped to the “stable” channel. It’s not completely broken, it “is” usable, especially after they restored my bulk move/copy button, but I still can’t use the Retention app, at least last time I looked, so I’ve literally got daily cron scripts to check those folders for old files and delete them, then trigger an occ files:scan of the affected directories to keep the Nextcloud database in sync with the changes. This however, bypasses the built-in trash bin so I can’t recover the files in the event of an issue. I actually considered rolling back to 27 for a bit, but decided against it, so if I were you, I would stick with 27 for a while and keep an ear to the ground regarding any issues people are having that are or aren’t getting fixed in 28.

I’ve hosted mine for years on my own bare metal Debian/Apache install and 28 is the first update that has been a major pain. I’ve had the occasional need to install a new package to enable a new feature, or needed to add new/missing indices to the database, but the web interface literally tells you how to do those things, so they’re not hard.

28 though broke several of the “featured” apps that I use regularly, like “Retention”. It also introduced some questionable UI changes that they had to fix with the recent .1 update. I’ll get occasional errors when trying to move or delete files in the web interface and everything. 28 really feels like beta software, even though we’re a point release in and I got it from the “stable” update channel.

My home server started as an HP Pavilion P6803w desktop PC. A decade later it has a better case, better power supply, more RAM, better CPU, more drives and runs Debian instead of Windows 7. The only original part is the motherboard.

Wow I was seriously shook for a moment until I saw the /s at the end, lol.

I have an a shed I built a year or two ago, but it’s about 100 feet from the house with no electricity to it. I’ve considered running power and ethernet to it and connecting those drives to a raspberry pi. That way I could rsync my backups over SSH to an “off-site”, aka, not in the same building, backup on a more regular basis, and also not have to worry about the potential damage that might occur from hauling them around in a car all the time.

I have an external hard drive that I keep in the car. I bring it in once a month and sync it with the server. The data partition is encrypted so that even if it were to get stolen, the data itself is safe.

Server 1 OS: Debian Nextcloud Plex

Server 2 (raspberry pi) OS: Raspbian Lite PiHole PiVPN