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Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

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Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#151
post #140

I feel bad for the engineers there, who clearly are not in charge.

Oh man you have no idea. I spent a year there running the Network Controller team. "Shit show" doesn't even begin to describe it.

Please tell us more.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They’re in control of what they tell me Have you never interacted in a non-business sense with someone who worked customer support? They DO NOT have control of what they tell you. They will get fired real quick if they don't follow the script. Especially someone working the first line of support in a chat box. C'mon man.

So this awful response was part of the official script? That's even worse.

But it doesn't justify being rude to the support person.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#154
post #86

I have been watching Ubiquiti slowly go downhill over the past five years. I finally jumped ship to Mikrotik for a recent addition to my network and they seem like a good replacement for power users. Nothing they sell is quite as user friendly as the Ubiquiti gear, but I would rather have to spend a few minutes at a console then loose control over my network because a SaaS went offline

> loose control over my network because a SaaS went offline

That doesn't sound correct. I've always been able to access my controller without internet access as long as I was on the same LAN and was hitting the controller IP directly.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's a pretty big bummer. I used to recommend their stuff a lot and I don't know if I'll be able to do that from now on. It's not like their hardware is cheap, I'd much rather pay a monthly subscription than be served ads.

> I'd much rather pay a monthly subscription than be served ads. Why not both?! /s but probably for real eventually.

This is what Chase bank does in their app.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#158

I'm going to go out on a limb here to point out the inconsistency of this entire thread. For the following reasoning, I'm going to use the word "ad" in the broad sense. 1. Everybody is excited with Github's new features that they promote on the dashboard. Sometimes popups and flashes too. Are they not ads? 2. Nobody ever complains about Github showing ads. 3. Github is a SaaS. 4. unify.ui.com is a SaaS 5. OP is compl…

Github makes it a single click to hide their intrusive notifications and such. They're rather tasteful at where and when they show you something. They have a notifications panel you can click once and then it won't bug you until the next time.

This screenshot shows the ad takes up a huge chunk of real estate and can only be turned off by presumably opting out of some new experience, which means it might become permanent. If enough of the internet protests, obviously Ubiquity might re-think their recent actions... but it won't change their overall product direction which is to try to encourage you to buy newer products by any means they can.

The proper equivalent would be if my Amazon Echo started showing me ads for a new Amazon Echo, or if I launched the Echo app and it said, hey, do you want to buy the new Echo at the top and I couldn't remove it. Perhaps another comparison: What if Nest suddenly changed to show an ad when you went to change your thermostat's settings such that you could learn about the new Nest that replaces your old hunk of junk? Or imagine if you opened System Preferences or About This Mac, and saw an ad for the latest and greatest MacBook from Apple? Like, do I really want to see stats about how my battery life is only 10% that of the newest Apple Silicon?

SaaS or not, there's a difference between advertising some new service I don't need and advertising new HARDWARE I don't need within my existing, perfectly good, management control panel for my existing hardware. Whether its hosted on a website or not is just an implementation detail. They could have used Electron, same result.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#159

One of the reasons I have used Ubiquiti over the last few years is their product quality over other networking hardware. The inclusion of ads leads me to revisit those assumptions before my next purchase. Ads, even if self-promotion, are a bellwether for a company being desperate or greedy, neither of which bodes well for their long-term product quality, usually because it indicates sales people are making the decisi…

Ubiquiti products are not quality. They beta test in prod, more less.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#160

One auto update they broke my laptop's ability to connect. Turns out they'd auto enabled 5 GHz band steering, but my laptop's chipset only did 2.4 GHz. Even when it was enabled, the Android management app said the setting was disabled. Customer support directed me to the forums. Ubiquiti didn't respond to my post. I posted on a thread where someone else was seeing the same problem, where a number of people gaslit me…

We have 5 ubiquiti switches on our office network that are running 4 year old firmware. The next version after started dropping DHCP packets! I followed the thread for months and months and they never fixed the issue. I gave up caring, stopped watching the thread and swore never to buy any of their products again. I do wonder if they ever fixed the issue. The switches lock up every couple months and need a hard reboo…

I got bitten by the same problem. There is a workaround but the bug is silly!
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