Getting ads before old podcasts despite being a Premium member.

I've been wanting to go back and listen to some old Giant Bombcasts. However, when I try downloading the podcasts from the early days, which never had any ads on them, there are ads for some reason. For example, I get an ad before this, the first podcast from 2012 (which, by the way, has a brief mention of how it sucks to pay for ads). There is no ad if I use the in-site player, but when I click on "Download" there is an ad right at the start. This is unacceptable because I intend to listen to these podcasts on a device and in a place with no internet connection, so using the website's player is not an option.

I thought when I bought a premium subscription then I would get an ad-free experience, considering that the page where you subscribe says "Ad-free experience". It also says "no podcast advertisements*", with an asterisk, but there is no subsequent explanation for the asterisk. You can't just put a naked asterisk after a promise and then not fulfill the promise.

EDIT: It has now been 6 months and the asterisk is STILL THERE, as of June 13, 2022.

EDIT 2022-12-29: It has now been 13 months and the asterisk is still there. Does anybody who works on the site ever actually look at the site?

This should be in the Bug Reporting forum, as I don't think the ads are intended for premium users. I downloaded that episode and for me it also had an ad auto-inserted at the start on the download version. @rorie is probably the one to ask about this.

Hey, sorry about the asterisk; we recently changed the upgrade page and I think the asterisk text got lost in the shuffle. It's supposed to say that we do not edit out ads for live broadcasts but do for the archives.

And yes, I'm unaware of why there would be ads inserted into older podcasts but it's certainly not intentional; apologies for that. I'll see if I can figure out why that would be happening.

I'll admit I was frustrated and in hindsight I could have been nicer in my original post and not assumed it was intentional. I'm just so accustomed to deceit in advertising that it's hard to remember that's not always the explanation.

@zeddy_ryan: @bisonhero: OK I poked around and it looks like this is what happened: Premium podcasts should not have ads inserted into them, but unfortunately most of the older podcasts before we started doing podcast ads do not have Premium versions published on our side of things. So even if you're Premium and logged in, there is no Premium version of the older podcasts, and as such you're getting the free version with the automatic ad stitched in. This isn't complicated to fix on a case-by-case basis (Jeff already fixed the one you linked above), but it's a bit time consuming. I'll add it to the list of things to fix around here, but if you want to give me a ballpark for how many older Bombcasts you'll be downloading I can get the first 20 or 30 of them fixed in the meantime.

Rorie eternal MVP

@rorie: Thank you for the assistance! I'll eventually be downloading all of 2008 and 2012, starting with 2012. If the first 20 or so podcasts from 2012 could be fixed, that should last me for quite a long time.

I suppose BisonHero was right; I should have made this a bug report! Sorry

OK, give me a bit of time and I think I should be able to track these down!

I did the rest of the Jan 2012 episodes so those should hopefully be fixed now; I'm going to wait and make sure there's no unforeseen consequences before doing any more.

The amount of personal attention Rorie gives to individual cases is astounding. I'd tip my hat if i'd worn one.

I am amazed. I now feel like my original post wasn't worthy of such a helpful response. Sorry again for my initial attitude.

Matt Rorie you're setting unreasonably high standards for customer support specialists!

Three months later and the asterisk is still there without an explanation, and no more podcast episodes have been fixed that I'm aware of. If I'm really the only person that cares, then I guess just forget it. I wrote a small ad-hoc bash script to download all the ad-free podcast episodes I wanted, once I realized the direct URL to the ad-free mp3 files could be found in the page source. So for me personally, I consider this issue to be a thing of the past, as is my continued interest in GB's future. I got what need, goodbye.

@zeddy_ryan: Hey I apologize, buddy, this was on my to-do list but I just got distracted by a series of emergencies and it slipped off my radar. I'll try to get back to this at some point soon. This is a pretty manual process that will take a fair amount of time to get through but I'll try to make some space for it when I have a slow day, of which there are not many these days, but I'll add it to my Outlook to-do list.

I'm glad you found a solution to the problem for yourself but I'll still try to get this done to ensure no one else runs into it.

I have ran into this problem as well, listening to the old podcasts on pocket casts.

It's still on my to-do list but it'll take a bit of time to do. Maybe I'll see if I can get an engineer to script out a way to copy all the older non-Premium podcasts; let me see if that would be doable.

Never promise what one cannot deliver. Words to live by

Hey @rorie, is there any update to this? I'm thinking about doing a restart with the 15th anniversary next month, but it's going to suck to have the podcast randomly cut out to an ad multiple times a show.

Hey, sorry, this fell off my radar but I'll see if I can make time for it this month.

@rorie: Thanks Rorie. I'll try to find some puppies to pet to send you some energy.

@shaggsmagoo:Can you check the podcasts at the bottom of this thread and let me know if they're fixed?

https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/giant-bomb-premium-upgrade-page-has-a-dangling-ast-1908785/#js-message-9

@rorie: Both of those podcasts are now showing up on the Premium Bombcast feed on Pocketcasts and did not have an ad play when I started listening to them.