## Sad running thread with Vimeo support. Rearranged to chronological order. ---------------------------------------------- ## TL;DR: I am *not* impressed with Vimeo, especially when they hold themselves ## out as a "professional" level organization. When some rando can determine ## more about how their website works than their own support people can, that's ## not a good look for them. *Seven* different people involved by the end, all ## floundering and backpedaling and being flat-out evasive and finger-pointy. ## I've masked the name of the organization I was working with at the time, ## because certain elements within same would undoubtedly have a shitfit and ## accuse me of speaking badly on behalf of the organization when I in fact ## was not; I was researching information to bring back *to* the organization. ## It should be relatively obvious what the event was given the timeframe, ## however, and if you want more clarification, just ask. ## I began this adventure from dead-cold, not yet having a Vimeo account to ## work from, trying independently to raise someone at their support team. ---------------------------------------------- From: *Hobbit* Subject: your support form doesn't work To: support@vimeo.com Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2021 11:00:41 -0500 I'm trying to submit a support request, and the form at https://vimeo.com/help/contact only keeps redrawing some of the fields on clicking "next" and doesn't advance to any next step or visibly submit anything. I have a feeling it may be related to the precise problem we're trying to report, and you've created an impasse for us. Please advise. ---------------------------------------------- ## That elicited a canned autoresponse that basically says "fuck off" ---------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2021 16:03:13 +0000 From: Vimeo Support To: *Hobbit* Subject: Thanks for reaching out! ##- Please type your reply above this line -## Hi *Hobbit*, Thanks for writing in. It looks like you sent a direct email to an address we are not actively monitoring at this time. If you have a question or concern, and need to reach the Vimeo Support team, please use our contact form (at http://www.vimeo.com/help/contact). Receiving messages through the contact form will allow us to more directly respond to your inquiry, and provide you with better support in the process. If possible, we recommend logging in to your Vimeo account before using this form. We also highly recommend taking a look through our online help articles and documentation. You may be able to find an answer more quickly by: * Searching our Help Center: vimeo.com/help * Reading the Vimeo Guidelines: vimeo.com/guidelines * Learning how to Report a Violation: vimeo.com/help/violations Thank you for your understanding! LOVE, Vimeo ---------------------------------------------- ## My department head tried to send an invite and bring me in as an editor. ## Vimeo's login page didn't work, displayed a circle-slash forever after ## submitting a new username and password to join, with *no* indication or ## error or output like "you have to use group SSO" or whatever the ## actual problem might have been. ---------------------------------------------- From: Fred (department head) Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2021 22:27:36 -0400 Subject: Re: finally in, maybe To: "*Hobbit*" Ok, I have a sneaking suspicion that if you have a Google account associated with an email account, Vimeo forces SSO. I just invited fred@myhome.org to join and it sat there spinning until I used Google to login. I need to try another account, but it's not high on my list. You need to switch to the org's account, like this. Vimeo tends to hide things in their UI, it's one of many things I don't like about them. But the price and service is right for what we need. [image: image.png] Fred Technical Services Division Head ---------------------------------------------- ## At this point, I had finally managed to create an account and log in, ## so now I had a fighting chance of getting Vimeo to listen ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 2, 2021, 10:47 PM EDT Maybe now that I've got an account, I'll have some actual credibility with your support staff. I have spent far more time and frustration on Vimeo in general than has almost been worth my time. Youtube was *so* much simpler to get going. This time, I try to set up a livestream, for example https://vimeo.com/manage/events/1440055/settings which I just created. The page to manage i t [presumably?] comes up completely blank, except for a thin rainbow line at the top. I've got *everything* I can think of enabled -- scripting, third-party hosts, whatever. This is in Firefox or Chrome, even with the latest Firefox pulled down and loaded. It looks like it wants to swap to a "websockets" protocol, and I need some help debugging why the browser seems unable to do that. Just about nowhere have I found *useful* error messages produced by your product, it's been one round of guesswork after the other trying to work through these things. First it was the referer: headers thing. Then it was just setting up the account from Fred's invite. Now it's this. Tell me why I should bother continuing to pound on this. Well, we have an event to put together, so I sort of have to, and I want as direct a line to your developers as I can get. This has been ridiculous. ---------------------------------------------- From - Tue Nov 02 19:26:30 2021 Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2021 22:34:29 +0000 From: Vimeo Support To: *Hobbit* Subject: Thanks for reaching out! (8169182) ##- Please type your reply above this line -## Hi *Hobbit*, Thanks for writing to us! We received your message and we'll respond to hobbit@the-group.org as soon as possible. (How soon, you ask? Read more about our email response tim elines.) In the meantime, you may find an answer more quickly by: * Searching our Help Center: * Reading the Vimeo Guidelines: * Learning how to Report a Violation: You can respond to this email if you find the answer you were looking for, or if you would like to provide more information that will help us resolve your issue... the more detail, the better! LOVE, Vimeo ---------------------------------------------- ## Now we start the real support thread, *NOTE: still going to ## support@vimeo, and no ticket number embedded in the Subject: ---------------------------------------------- Bharath Bhushan, Nov 3, 2021, 4:56 AM EDT Hi there, Thanks for reaching out to Vimeo support. Your case requires a bit more investigation. We're looking into it and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Rest assured, we've received your request. Thank you for your patience. Sincerely, Bharath ---------------------------------------------- Arshad Khan, Nov 3, 2021, 10:34 AM EDT Hi there, Thank you for reaching out at Vimeo Support. I apologise for the inconvenience caused. Would you be able to provide some more information about your event? Here's what would be useful for us to know: - What Encoder settings were you using? (H.264 profile, resolution, frame rate, key frame interval, etc.) - How did you create this event? (On Vimeo or through an encoder integration) - Can you tell me the order of events? Did the stream connect originally and then experience disconnections, and if so how frequently did they occur? - Can you run an upload speed test at https://testmy.net/upload? Please **run the test on the network you would normally be streaming on**, and do so at a time when there is no live streaming taking place. - Can you run a traceroute to our ingest server (rtmp-global.cloud.vimeo.com) and provide us with a copy of the full results? - To run a traceroute on Windows, open a command prompt and type what is between the following brackets (tracert rtmp-global.cloud.vimeo.com). - To run a traceroute on Mac, open Terminal and type what is between the following brackets (traceroute rtmp-global.cloud.vimeo.com). - The trace will take a few seconds. Once it's complete, you will see your results on the last line listed in Milliseconds (ms). This will determine whether there is network interference between your broadcast machine and our ingest network. - The other test I'd like to conduct is if you can view the stream once it is live. Can you create a test event, connect your encoder, and then watch the stream on Vimeo? Press "D" on your keyboard to reveal the debug code. Please copy and paste this code in your reply to this message so I can take a look at your viewer session. With the results of these tests, I should be able to determine where along the signal flow this issue is occurring and offer a solution based on the results. Please let me know if you have any other questions, or if there's anything else I can do to help. Sincerely, Arshad Khan N ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 3, 2021, 3:17 PM EDT My upstream bandwidth is fine; I'm on a roughly 80 Mbit bidirectional FiOS connection. I never got far enough into the stream creation process to see any of the settings. I was able to create the event link, that's it; when trying to then go configure it, was when I was getting the blank page with the rainbow band at the top. No encoder, no stream connection, no uploads, no way to. Is this because my personal account is still "basic", even if I'm trying to work within the the-group pro environment? How do we fix this? I need to be able to debug *their* setup. I thought that Fred bringing me in with an invite would give me that type of status. Is there a ticket/incident number associated with this? If not yet, let's create one and start escalating this for real. There are several other issues around the UX in general that need to be addressed. ---------------------------------------------- Arshad Khan, Nov 4, 2021, 10:37 AM EDT Hi there, Thanks so much for your message! Your case requires a bit more investigation so I'm passing it up to a senior member of our team to look into. You'll hear back fro m us soon. Thanks for your patience! Sincerely, Arshad Khan N ---------------------------------------------- ## so how many rounds of "passing it up to our senior team" does it take?? ## before that, their automated "support" system wouldn't even take my ## complaint, insisted I had to have an account first. Fuck that. ---------------------------------------------- Kristine B., Nov 4, 2021, 10:39 AM EDT Hi there, Thanks so much for your patience! My name is Kristine, and Arshad sent your ticket my way for some assistance. I understand that you are having some trouble setting up your Live Event - my apologies for that. I'd like to collect more information from you so that we can better investigate what may be happening. Please send us the following information: - What operating system and browser version are you using when you run into this issue? If you're not sure of the exact versions, please visit supportdetails.com and send us a screenshot. - Do you also have this issue on another browser? Please let us know which other browser you tried, along with the version number. - Do you continue to have this issue after clearing the cache and cookies on your browser(s)? - Do you have any browser extensions enabled in your browser? If so, please try disabling them. - Have you tried using a different computer? In addition to going through the above steps, we'd always encourage you to ensure that you're using the most up-to-date browser. You can get updates here: http://browsehappy.com/ Thank you for your help! Sincerely, Kristine B. ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 4, 2021, 2:08 PM EDT Given that I couldn't even follow the invite by supplying a new password and had to resort to the "log in with google" stuff, I was very reluctant to try Chrome because of Chrome's relationship with Google. I don't keep Google cookies in Chrome by policy. I fought with your login page for *two hours* the other day, only getting that greyed-out button saying "joining Vimeo..." and the circle-slash cursor in it. However, after getting on and setting up a separate password for Vimeo, today I was able to try Chrome on the same event page, and that seems to work on the event settings page. Firefox is still a no-go, and I would far rather get that debugged and use it instead of having to rely on Chrome because nobody could give me a solid, technical answer on why Firefox wasn't working. I'm enclosing a screenshot from today's debugging. Firefox is throwing a ton of errors from YOUR javascript, and that seems to be holding up the works. I'm willing to get that far into the weeds on diagnosis but I'm not really much of a backend coder. I can try to track down where things are going wrong. This is why I want to work interactively *with* your dev staff and figure this out, because if it's a setting with regard to Firefox then we need to tell OUR teams how to configure their own environments, and YOU need to tell your clients what to do if they see the same problems. I'm aware of all the standard stuff people get told, and of course know exactly the state of my cache/cookies/etc. Please don't talk down to me. Also remember that not everybody *has* the option of another browser, another computer, etc. That's just uninformed stonewalling and frankly a waste of everyone's time. Firefox, as you see, is a very recent stable release. Chrome is 89 or so. Both have scripting fully enabled for the components I believe necessary for operation. Junk sites like "newrelic" are not permitted connections; we have some serious objections to the third-party crap you try to send your visitors out to behind their backs. A brief test allowing all that stuff yesterday still produced failure anyways, so that's not the issue either. If you need me to capture a couple of .HAR network log files, let me know. I'm poking through a couple already but I'm not sure what I'm looking for; that is where your dev team needs to get involved. Where, for example, is stuff like navigator.mediaDevices *supposed* to get defined?? Etc. Again, I see no incident number attached to this. Please assign it one, so we don't lose track of the flow of this. Attachment(s): v-ff-errors.jpg - https://vimeo.zendesk.com/attachments/token/jdQIJ57 kRtPGQwc3S/?name=v-ff-errors.jpg ---------------------------------------------- Talona J, Nov 4, 2021, 2:30 PM EDT Hi there, Thank you for getting back to us with that information. Talona here from Vimeo Support with Kristine, stepping in while they're away. Sorry for the continued trouble you've experienced here. In order to look into this issue further, could you please send us the following information? - Which versions of Chrome and Firefox have you used? - Do you have any extensions enabled? If so, please try turning them off. - Browser console log when the error is appearing - HAR file from browser when the error is appearing To obtain the console log, follow these steps: 1. As you're replicating the issue, right-click on the page where the problem appears and select **Inspect Element** or** Inspect** for Chrome_ (Note: To open the console in Safari, you may first have to enable the "Show Develop menu in menu bar" setting in the "Advanced" section of Safari's preferences - see __here__)_. 2. In the new window that appears, click on the **Console** tab. 3. With the Console tab open, refresh the page within your browser, and then attempt to reproduce the issue you are experiencing. 4. As you replicate the issue, you may notice errors in red pop up in the Console. Right-click on any of them and save the log file. The file gene rated will include all log errors listed, not just the single one you right-clicked. 5. Attach that Console Log file to this email so we can take a look! To generate an HAR file, follow the steps in this article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204410413-Generating-a-HAR-file-for-troubleshooting You'll want to make sure that you generate these from your browser when you're replicating the issue. Thanks for your help, I look forward to your reply! Sincerely, Talona J ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 4, 2021, 4:16 PM EDT Did you actually read my last message, and look at the screenshot?? Most of everything you asked for was in there. Please pay attention. Maybe if you stopped kicking me all over your office, rather than getting my info in front of the right people, we could make progress here. These .har files are ginormous, I hesitate to send those unless there's a really good reason but if you're not going to actually examine the materials I send, I don't see the point. Stream viewing and playback, by the way, seems to work fine in Firefox. It's only the stream setup and studio that won't load. ---------------------------------------------- Talona J, Nov 4, 2021, 4:44 PM EDT Hi there, Thanks for your reply and my sincere apologies for any confusion or inconvenience here. I'm afraid that we will need more information to investigate this issue further. Are you able to provide a HAR file and browser versions? Here's how to get a HAR file: > To generate an HAR file, follow the steps in this article: https://supp ort.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204410413-Generating-a-HAR-file-for-tro ubleshooting Please let us know if you have any questions. Sincerely, Talona J ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 4, 2021, 6:33 PM EDT Similar to what I've been doing with my email replies, I've come up with a way to radically shorten .har files and still retain the important bits. I simply truncate the "text": fields, which all contain content that was supplied by you and you already know about. So attached is a .zip from one of the failing firefox sessions. Of particular interest may be the websocket interaction; I can't tell if that actually started doing the right protocol or not. Also, ignore what I send in the user-agent strings. That's not the Firefox version actually running; the true 91.3 is shown at the top of the file. Oh, and BTW, the base platform here is Ubuntu 18.04 if I didn't mention that before. I have a new question, having had some success with Chrome [which is no excuse to not fix the Firefox problem]: what is the timeout on an inactive live stream without RTMP data input, before it gets moved over to a playback video? Can we tailor that? It seems awfully short. tnx Attachment(s): ff.zip - https://vimeo.zendesk.com/attachments/token/Z5wtaRzUYkEqeS ---------------------------------------------- Carrie M., Nov 4, 2021, 6:50 PM EDT Hi there, Thanks for following up with those additional details. My name is Carrie, and I'm on Vimeo's Support Team with Talona. My apologies for the trouble you've experienced, and we appreciate the information you've provided. I've gone ahead and escalated your case along to a live specialist who can better assist with this, and you will receive another note from us as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience! Sincerely, Carrie M. ---------------------------------------------- Chris, Nov 6, 2021, 11:19 AM EDT Hi there, My name is Chris, and I'm on the Live streaming Support Team. Thanks so much for your message! Your case requires a bit more investigation so I'm passing it up to a senior member of our team to look into. You'll hear back from us soon. Thanks for your patience! Sincerely, Chris ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 9, 2021, 5:17 AM EST This case has been through at least six people around your organization by now, and this is starting to feel like a runaround. This should not take a week-plus to solve. Where are your coders?? Where's the TICKET NUMBER I keep asking for? Is there any further testing we can do on our end to help get a handle on this Firefox problem? ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 10, 2021, 5:03 PM EST How are we doing on this? Here's another text-shortened .HAR file, which may be a slightly cleaner run of trying to get to the stream-studio page. Still waiting to work on debugging with dev-level staff. Attachment(s): har2.zip - https://vimeo.zendesk.com/attachments/token/oO0WLhrQRQX ox533z/?name=har2.zip ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 11, 2021, 3:09 PM EST Update: I've found at least one of the problems. Have you? What's going on with this?? We're a week and a half into this Firefox issue. ---------------------------------------------- Nicholas E., Nov 23, 2021, 4:25 PM EST Hi there, Thanks so much for getting back to us! My name is Nicholas with Vimeo Live Support, I'm stepping in to help out. I wanted to make sure we address a couple of the questions that we haven't answered for you yet. The ticket number for this thread is 8169365. If a stream is disconnected for more than 5 minutes that will cause the event to timeout and automatically be archived. There is not currently an option to change the amount of time that takes, but I would be happy to submit that to our developers as a feature request. The issue that you pointed out with FireFox definitely seems odd, but we have not been able to replicate this on our end, so it does seem to be more localized. If you could document this and how we can replicate it using Vimeo Record or something like screencast: https://screencast-o-matic.com/ it would be super helpful. I did also want to note that the Vimeo team can't provide in-depth browser support or in-depth support for making our videos available on a private network. That said we are happy to provide some basic information. I would recommend checking out our help center, here is an article that will give more details on browser requirements. You can check out this article for more information about recommendations for streaming (sites that need to be whitelisted and network ports that should be open for communication to Vimeo). We would also recommend contacting your network administrator for more information about the errors that are coming up. If your network admin needs more information from us, please provide all the details about the errors you're receiving and the additional information you need to get past them. We will do our best to help. With all this in mind, we have raised this up with our engineering team as well so that we can investigate any potential issues with the platform. We'll keep an eye out for your reply! Sincerely, Nicholas E. ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 23, 2021, 8:52 PM EST You're the *seventh* person to get involved in this, and the delay between the last time I asked about status caused me to basically give up on ever getting any help on this stuff. Not a good look for you guys; people tend to write up how their events went, and statements of "we gave up on Vimeo as hopeless and streamed via Youtube instead" is not the kind of publicity you want. The issue with Firefox isn't so odd after all, and I finally found the right config item that seemed to make all the difference. Because I normally don't need realtime media in my configuration, my about:config contained user_pref("media.peerconnection.enabled", false); which turns off WebRTC entirely. Once that was enabled, the streaming page came up and more or less worked. However, without that, it just comes up blank with NO indication that WebRTC capability was inaccessible. There's at least one thing to fix -- describe what's wrong, don't just produce blank pages. There may be equivalent settings in Chrome, under "chrome://flags". There's also the outstanding issue with referers, but I think that has mostly to do with embedding. It's an unreliable way to try and control that aspect. Maybe you can't provide "browser support", but you can get really specific about what features are required for which website facilities. Along with suggestions for most standard browsers for a user to make sure they're available/enabled. You can't just talk about particular versions of the browser, because two installations of the same identical distro can have wildly different settings. The more lame party-line "clear your cache and cookies" someone gets from your support people, the more insulting it feels to anyone who knows to try that and other standard stuff before reaching out. I don't quite understand why the per-item "live event" page can't at least draw the framework and player areas, and then fail to actually connect to the streaming components due to to WebRTC being off, instead of giving absolutely no hint of what it needs. My "network administrator" is me. Please don't talk down to me, or anyone, like that. Like browser features, list the ports/protocols that your stuff needs to use and WHY it needs to use those things. You didn't actually send a link to the item in your "help center", but I might have found the right ones anyway -- pages about network settings. The majority of typical home firewall setups will allow all that outbound, but exceptions can happen so a solid description [that will also sit well with "network administrators" if needed] is useful to have as reassurance. For all the third-party sites not vimeo/vimeocdn, also explain *what* type of content you're getting from the others. It is risky to just farm off backend connections to third-party places outside of your control, and compromises there could compromise YOUR customers and you wouldn't even know for a long time. This is a huge issue -- if I caught my bank doing that, for example, I'd be out of there in an instant and looking for an institution with an actual clue about client security. For instance, in the allowable domains you list, you don't include "zendesk.com" or zdassets, "statuspage.io", "solvvy.com", googleadservices, doubleclick, etc. Guess what? *I'm* not going to permit connections to those places, especially garbage that tries to track me. F that. Get rid of the intrusive chaff here. Stream lifetime configurability is definitely a desireable feature. Youtube streams set to not auto-terminate stay alive for at least six hours, maybe more, in case you're running multiple sessions and want to have people watch it at the same link throughout, say, a day of a conference. Five minutes is way too short in such scenarios, if the desire is to capture the entire day's stream as one entity. Thanks for picking this up again, anyway. At a minimum I hope it plows into constructive documentation changes and/or reasonable error output. ---------------------------------------------- Nicholas E., Nov 23, 2021, 9:05 PM EST Hey there, Thanks again for getting back to us! I am glad that you were able to resolve the problem! Also, while I completely understand your frustrations, WebRTC is not a Vimeo specific setting and would be out of our scope of support to go in depth into those kinds of browser settings, this is because if we recommend you change something and it causes bigger issues then we would be liable for that. Please also note that any attempts that we make at gathering more information or making suggestions as part of our troubleshooting are absolutely never meant in a demeaning sort of way. We do not know your experience or your areas of expertise when you contact support but we do our absolute best to help every one of our awesome customers in a consistent way. Any time you reach out we will ask the basic questions about the problem so that we can gain a full understanding of what is happening and narrow down any potential causes. In this case, through your own troubleshooting it seems you were able to narrow it down to FireFox, which you were also able to resolve. Let us know if you have any other Vimeo related questions, we're always here to help! Sincerely, Nicholas E. ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 24, 2021, 6:44 AM EST WebRTC is certainly a Vimeo specific setting if Vimeo simply *fails* to work or issue any remedial guidance without it. Given my observations, it is *precisely* within your scope of support. If anything, you are "liable" for hidden dysfunctionality causing a user to waste a ton of time and eventually have to discover the answer on their own. Basically, I have received *no* support from your staff, and you do NOT want me answering any surveys about it. Sheez. The way I was bounced all over your office for weeks was completely laughable. If our event was actually running at this point instead of us still being in research/setup phases, we would have been HOSED. At the very least update your documentation as I described, and train your staff that WebRTC and referers and various other *distinctly client- controllable browser settings* may come into play and need to be modified. There is absolutely no harm in that. There is far more harm in leaving people to spin on a problem for days on end. I still want answers on the third-party stuff I mentioned. You NEED to address that. Don't talk about "liability", when you're so cavalier about those kinds of privacy violations. Your refusal to even open dialogue with inquirers who don't have a Vimeo account is also a problem. Competent people often go service-shopping by asking hard questions and sometimes even trying to submit bug reports; it's in your best interest to accomodate ALL of them. ---------------------------------------------- Nicholas Estes, Nov 24, 2021, 12:49 PM EST Hey there, Glad to hear back! Apologies if I had missed anything in your last reply, I do understand your concerns and I agree that these are very good questions, I do need to reiterate the Vimeo team can't provide in-depth browser or networking support. We also do not provide support for third-party services, we are extremely limited with the support that we can provide in these cases. As for tracking, Vimeo does use various tracking technologies to help us understand how people use Vimeo, how we can improve to give you the best experience, and in certain cases, to allow us to show you Vimeo ads on third party sites. However, these trackers can certainly be limited based on your preferences. To limit the cookies stored on your device, you can utilize your browser preferences. The following steps may help with blocking/deleting any unwa nted cookies or pixels: Go to the applicable settings for your browser (d epending upon the browser, cookie settings may live within advanced setti ngs): Under either "Privacy" or "Security" select "Cookie Settings" Next select "Block," "Clear" or "Allow," based on your preference Then visit Vimeo.com, to ensure your preferred settings have been updated. If your browser allows you to create an exception for an entire domain, you should be able to insert vimeo.com to limit all cookies and pixels from our domain. Note, that limitation of the Vimeo VUID cookie may result in player performance issues. You can find more information on Referrer-Policy HTTP header controls and how to correct some of those issues here: https://developer.mozilla.org/ en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Referrer-Policy You can read more about our privacy policies at https://vimeo.com/privacy Also, you are correct that in some setups communication is done through WebRTC between your computer and our servers. As a note, the article shared in an earlier email (here) was suggested as it includes our recommended firewall configurations (ports including those recommended for communication via WebRTC) as well as domains needing to be whitelisted, these configurations do resolve most communication issues and as you mentioned the issue was related to WebRTC. While WebRTC is a communication method used, but not a service or product specific to Vimeo. I do also want to let you know that we accept any and all feedback and you are absolutely always welcome to use they surveys to leave that feedback (good or bad). We'll keep an eye out for your reply! Sincerely, Nicholas E. ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Nov 24, 2021, 2:38 PM EST And yet, there you were later in the same message providing some degree of browser support. Basics like cookie handling *are* going to vary all over the place client to client, as well as Javascript allow settings and device permissions and who knows what-all else. You will find yourselves having to help people with *some* minimum of these things, no doubt. I don't know what you consider your threshold of "in-depth", but enabling features like WebRTC if needed seems fairly fundamental too. I will remain on record as officially objecting to your tracking, and ask that your developers work toward having options for users to opt OUT of it. Note that I wasn't asking for "support" with third-party services; I in fact want the nonessential junk ones completely decoupled from our activities. There is one other point I forgot to raise before -- one of those third-party RTC sites sends streams through "sd-rtn.com". Do a WHOIS lookup on that. It appears to be some *Chinese* entity, possibly associated with "agora.io" that I've run into in other contexts, and if Vimeo is sending domestic content offshore then you have a LOT of explaining to do. Remember how that bit Zoom hard in the ass when the pandemic started? They fixed that within a couple of weeks once it became generally known what they were doing. Be very careful about these relationships. If I could as a priority direct your developers' attention toward better error handling and human-readable problem descriptions when something goes wrong, let's at least do that. This applies to how I was getting stuck on the login page, how the stream setup didn't appear to work, and things like the embedding restrictions. They should *tell* the user what's wrong in a clear manner. That alone can probably take a good chunk of load off your support desk. Then you'd have more time to answer questions from folks without accounts instead of stonewalling them with lies about "unmonitored mailbox". ---------------------------------------------- Nicholas Estes, Nov 24, 2021, 3:22 PM EST Hey there, Thanks again for getting back! Your privacy is absolutely a legitimate concern. I'm assigning your case to a member of our Trust & Safety team who can better assist you with any privacy concerns you have about data tracking with Vimeo. You'll hear back from us again shortly. Thank you for your patience! Sincerely, Nicholas E. ---------------------------------------------- Kit, Dec 9, 2021, 5:25 PM EST Hello, My name is Kit and I work on Vimeo's Trust and Safety team. Thank you for raising this issue. We take privacy very seriously here at Vimeo. Please refer to these documents which every user who visits our site agrees to for further information: Terms of Service (https://vimeo.com/terms), Privacy Policy (https://vimeo .com/privacy) Cookie Policy (https://vimeo.com/cookie_policy) We appreciate your understanding. Sincerely, Kit Trust and Safety Manager ---------------------------------------------- Hobbit, Dec 9, 2021, 6:34 PM EST Well, pointing at huge reams of legalese is a pretty flimsy excuse, and in fact the privacy and terms documents don't even *load* right in some browser environments. I had to jump through significant hoops to actually view it. Nobody's going to "agree" to something that they can't read. Why can't you make these items straightforward text right from vimeo.com?? Instead, your code does some wacky cross-load via some scripting stuff at appds8093.blob.core.windows.net, which then loads a JSON blob from onetrust.com and right there, you've already sent a visitor gratuitously all over the place. At each one of those steps is another chance for the interaction to go wrong and FAIL to load the policy statements. Kick that back to your developers and try to convince them just how WRONG this approach is. If any items ar e presented as straightforward HTML or text on most websites, it's those types of content, because they WANT that stuff to be completely browser-neutral and universally readable. You've gone and screwed that up, and then expect everybody to operate under it. See attached shot of these observed components. Furthermore, any such statements should ENUMERATE and fully disclose all of the third parties you "may" send user information to, aggregated or not. That's one reason I was asking about specific entities and what your precise relationship with them is. We have a RIGHT to know that, to better inform our own decisions to participate or not. Attachment(s): jsjunk.jpg - https://vimeo-ts.zendesk.com/attachments/token/TFO5NEBBGyN dGO0E4L8/?name=jsjunk.jpg ---------------------------------------------- Kit, Dec 10, 2021, 2:20 PM EST Hi there, I will be sure to relay this information to our developers. Thank you very much for your feedback. If you have any other questions or concerns please let me know so that I can assist you further. Sincerely, Kit Trust and Safety Manager ---------------------------------------------- ## At this point, I was SO DONE with these clowns. ## ## General conclusion: Use something else. Even Youtube is by far ## a better option than the frustrations and UX deficiencies in Vimeo. ----------------------------------------------