This seems to be very useful information.

I am very much in favor of including this as and opt-in option during  
the installer.

I disagree with Chris – one should be able to opt-out of this later on  
in the options page.

The polling frequency should be relatively infrequent (once a month?).

On Sep 4, 2008, at 10:18 AM, Chris J. Davis wrote:

> I am very much in favor of this being an opt-in option at the end of  
> the installer. I don't think we need to have this be more than a one  
> time occurrence.
>
> Chris
>
> On Sep 4, 2008, at 8:29 AM, Chris Meller wrote:
>
>> I was playing around with USVN (a web-based Subversion management  
>> GUI), and one of the installer steps [1] was whether or not to  
>> check for updates and submit server stats.
>>
>> I know we've talked previously about asking during install whether  
>> or not we should check for updates (for paranoia reasons), but I'd  
>> like to bring up discussion about adding a second option for  
>> submitting stats. Often there are many things that projects have  
>> trouble judging the availability of on the average host (versions,  
>> extensions, etc.), and having some centralized collection mechanism  
>> would greatly improve our ability to judge the extent we could  
>> reliably anticipate such things. Ideally, I would also love to see  
>> us publish these statistics in some manner so that the larger  
>> community could benefit from our efforts.
>>
>> A few examples of things this could help with:
>>
>> - Our mbstring vs. iconv discussion largely centered around which  
>> extension was more widely available
>> - A question came up just the other day on IRC involving a problem  
>> with the value of $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']. No one really knew if  
>> that was valid or not - it was set, but not to a value we'd have  
>> predicted. The reliability of other _SERVER variables is also  
>> suspect at times.
>> - Knowing which PHP versions are in use has a wealth of advantages  
>> (duh)
>> - Database driver and translation usage could help us target  
>> resources more accurately
>>
>> Some basic information about your environment could be bottled up  
>> locally and submitted at the same time as update checks are  
>> performed (or at any other interval, via cron - it really wouldn't  
>> matter) and it could always be turned off in the options at any  
>> time if you'd opted-in during install. For bonus points, I suppose  
>> we could add the ability to turn on and off the individual data  
>> points we were collecting if, for example, the admin didn't want us  
>> collecting $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] from its users.
>>
>> We would need a clear and firm privacy policy, but we were going to  
>> do that for updates anyway. Most of the data would be pretty  
>> harmless, certainly nothing I would worry about, and could  
>> potentially also be scrubbed before being sent (knowing simply that  
>> SCRIPT_NAME is set but not what it contains is somewhat less  
>> useful, but still helpful, for example).
>>
>> This is one of those things that could really turn out to be as  
>> simple or as complex as we care to make it, I simply wanted to  
>> throw out an idea and get some basic feedback on it. Opinions?
>>
>> [1] http://chrismeller.com/dump/1a0b5268efd464c19258455b2bea3cb8.png
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> >


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