Hi All,
First off, let me thank you all for the great effort with all your addons.
The addons are what makes XBMC so great - keep it up!
We'll be introducing download statistics within XBMC for addons in Eden, and
to do this we've got some nice statistics-collecting stuff care of TheUni's
work with google analytics.
First off, I want to assure you that no user-data is collected in order to
generate these stats. Basically what happens is we receive a download
request on our server, and then apache then requests a .gif (server-side)
from google analytics. Thus, the only info google sees is that the
xbmc.orgserver is downloading a particular .gif. The location of the
.gif tells
google what the download was (eg "script.xbmc.subtitles-v1.0.7.zip") and the
referrer string tells analytics whether this is an update or fresh install
(we know this as XBMC sets this info in the referer URL - or at least it
will do in Dharma 10.1 as we forgot to backport it!). In addition, the
user-agent string tells us XBMC version and OS version.
We're working on adding the downloads info into the UI at the moment, and
we're wondering what makes the most sense to include. My thinking is that
we want:
1. The total downloads.
2. Some measure of "install base" or "popularity".
Number 1 is obvious. Number 2 is not so obvious. Reason is that addons that
have had a lot of updates will obviously have a lot of downloads, as those
users will ofcourse be receiving the updates. Thus, total downloads itself
isn't really good measure of install base. If we only use "fresh" installs
(i.e. ignore all updates), however, then those addons that are included with
XBMC (recentlyadded, confluence etc.) will essentially be zero as you can't
"fresh" install it (you already have it). Another measure might be
total_downloads/number_of_updates. Assuming updates are far enough about
that most users will get each update, then we can assume each user receives
the same number of updates and we have a reasonable number. Ofcourse, any
user that doesn't have auto-updates on, and instead just checks every month
or two screws that one up. An alternate is maybe just listing some sort of
fuzzy "frequency of update" thing (eg "Updated: Regularly") and let the user
take that into account.
We can also use this to order by number of downloads, or order by
"popularity", so whatever statistic we use it needs to be reasonably fair
(equally biased for the statisticians).
So, is this sane? Do you think a different measure is needed? Do you not
care?
PS: If you're interested in your downloads to date (regardless of whether
they include updates or not) I'll send through a post in a bit with those
totals.
Cheers,
Jonathan
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