U-Verse DVR series scheduled recordings are not functioning

Thank you for that information, ethanedwards.

Let’s meet in a Direct Message to discuss the best options to fix your recordings. Please check your Direct Message Inbox (it’s the chat icon next to the bell icon in the upper right corner of the Forums).

Aminah, AT&T Community Specialist

@ethanedwards 

@denirose 

@ATTHelp 

Has anyone heard back from the community specialist in there DM yet? or gotten any update?  I haven't gotten a response to my DM yet.

We need to get this elevated to the correct team to get this solved.  Standard troubleshooting checklists aren't going to fix a regional backend server side bug.  

It's just amazing that after 4 years at&t is still dealing with the same bug and still doesn't have a way to issue a solution quickly.  The must not share information between regions.  

Based on when I first started seeing hiccups I'm guessing it started at least a week ago, it's just recordings were already scheduled through the 4/20th for me.  

I also tried using twitter to get an answering and those customer service representatives keep just handing me off to new people who keep asking the same generic troubleshooting questions.  and then take hours to respond to their own answers.  I'd like to get this solved in hours/days not weeks/months.

I might try calling, but that's guaranteed to take at least a few hours to even get to someone who has a chance of understanding the issue, and then who knows how long before they can get the information to someone who can actually solve the issue.

@ethanedwards @madmax988 @ATTHelp 

I‘m not in the loop with any response from @ATTHelp but I did have a hugely frustrating and time wasting conversation with a phone rep. DON’T waste your time. You’ll get exactly what you described. Totally clueless, uninformed, untrained (except in reading a script), with robot-like focus on performing useless and irrelevant troubleshooting despite any efforts to make them understand they have an actual problem. They will not elevate the issue and look for real solutions. I’ve gotten my most helpful information from following these discussions and none from their reps.

Btw, I finished resetting my series (I had a relatively small list of about 80 which I reduced nearly in half.) So far it’s held up. You have your work cut out for you with over 300 if you go that route. Good luck. 

@denirose so you didn't get a response via direct message on these forums either?

I have been getting a response via Twitter dm but it's take forever since they only respond every 10minutes-every few hours for each response and now they are making me go through routine (Edited per community guidelines) diagnostics once again. 

Luckily I spent a few hours today deleting series that have been canceled and I knocked it down from 350 to 179. And when I get the other family members to go through it I'm sure I can knock it down further.  If I'm going to be stuck doing it every week I figure it's worth the time. 

@madmax988 No, I never heard from anybody from Att. Hats off to you for having the patience to deal with them. And for reducing your series list. If you can get it down to around 100 you can probably get them all edited in under an hour. One question: why every week? Do you really think the manual reset doesn’t hold? I read the second thread you linked here but not the first longer one. Is that where people said the manual changes were later wiped out? 

@denirose I forget which post it was on, there was a user @_xyzzy_ who did a lot of leg work... but I don't think they post on these forums any longer who posted about the workaround and then later posted it was temporary.

The eventually permanent fix buried in the 28 page thread ended up being some sort of update/fix/change at&t made on the server and once they did that it seemed to resolve within 24 hours.  When a user asked what the fix was, the @davidcs customer service rep who had been posting wouldn't tell anyone and claimed it was "proprietary" .  Which is either code for 1)I don't know they don't tell me anything 2) we never share any info no matter how general with customers 3)  they have no idea how they fixed it or it was super obvious that someone messed up and they don't want to appear incompetent.

It's pretty easy to rule out any fixes a customer or field tech  could do to fix it, since many of the people had their dvr's replaced and it obviously did nothing to fix it.  which isn't surprising since the scheduling is done in the cloud on a server and not on the dvr itself.  And since our dvrs are getting the full 12ish days of guide listings they normally get that means the dvrs are properly connected to the server.  so obviously the problem is in the server or the way the software handles the connection between dvr and server.  Since it hits a relatively small specific region at a time it seems it must be an issue or setting on a single system, because anything involving the main software would affect all uverse customers or at least a lot of customers spread out around the country.

Honestly with my experiences with at&t this is just par for the course and how they operate.  

I don't know if this will help at all, but I did just discover another symptom. When you use the workaround and then look at the guide listings sometimes the triple red dot indicating the show is going to record will appear, and sometimes it won't appear and is missing, even though it's now on the list of scheduled recordings. So clearly this is another indication that the guide listings part of the software and the series scheduled recordings part of the software are not communicating properly to each other. The show even missing the triple red dot does end up recording. (it's also weird because if you try to then set the show manually and you have other things recording you can get a recording conflict with itself. for example: all hour long shows 1) 8pm show recording on channel 1004, 2) 8pm show recording on channel 1006 3) 8pm show recording on channel 1010 with no red dots showing 4) attempt to manually record 8pm show recording on channel 1010 will result in conflict since 3 shows are already recording. (but if you eliminate #1 or #2 the system will happily record both #3+#4 even though they are identical channel and time slot, just a like a normal conflict resolution)

@madmax988 

I think “proprietary” is probably number 3 - they have no idea.

Your system sounds pretty glitchy. I checked, and I don’t seem to have any of those issues. It would probably help if more people commented. Maybe they’d take an interest in fixing it and stop their useless “troubleshooting”.  Too bad they don’t have you to help them. At least you’re looking at possibilities that might pinpoint the issue. They show no curiosity whatsoever. I hope our workarounds hold. I’m not counting on them. 

@madmax988 

@ethanedwards 

@ATTHelp 

After manually resetting recordings for all my series and verifying they all extended out two weeks, I just checked and, as I feared and dreaded, they stopped at that point and did not continue beyond that original two week period. So now I have about ten days worth, soon it will be five. Then I’ll have to do it all over again. Unacceptable, @ATTHelp . Do something about it. 

@denirose

@atthelp

That's what I was afraid of.  So it seems what's most likely happening is the system isn't actively updating /checking for shows that should be scheduled.  When we make a settings change with the workaround that obviously forces it to manually check to see if there are any shows it should schedule/not schedule. same with setting a new series or show manually. 

What's really annoying is with a bug like this i'm guessing the problem and fix could be something incredibly minor.  Like a single setting of how often to check for scheduling updates, or a mismatched server clock.  (often computer software might be written like check every 5 minutes, but if the clocks on the server don't match the clock in dvr or another piece of equipment 5 minutes might never arrive).  I thought maybe day light savings could be the issue but the past reports and this incident don't match up so that's probably not it.  But a shocking amount of software you wouldn't expect it to matter for requires clocks to match perfectly even being off by 1 second can cause issues.  

(for instance I once had a problem with my verizon cellphone, where 1 cell tower I drove by had been set to the wrong time zone, every time you drove by the tower the phone would update to incorrect time, and every app requiring time would break, calendar, alarms, reminders all make sense, but GPS(the standard is based on precise timing), and even games, etc were less expected but still effected). And then when you drove by next tower it would revert back to correct time, and be super confused why it just time traveled.  Verizon eventually was able to send out a tech to manually fix it by resetting the time zone on the clock and the problems went away.  (it did take them 2 months though just like att's bad service).  

I last left twitter agent when he signed off last night and he said he was reaching out to escalation teams and they were still looking for a solution/debating if it's actually a regional problem, (they require way more reports before they'll bother to do anthing).  I'm hoping after today 4/20 when  most shows stop recording for many users that they'll start getting calls reporting a problem.  Although that will only be mildly helpful since the majority of those calls will probably not get flagged for review in any meaningful way, and I suspect att tier 1 techs will just tell them erase all their recordings and send them a replacement dvr in hopes it fixes it.  now a week or 2 later when those replacement dvrs fix nothing then maybe someone at tier 2 will actually start trying to diagnose problem....if we are lucky

Since most users don't check scheduled recordings regularly i'm betting a lot of people are going to be suddenly surprised tomorrow