[wp-hackers] Automatic feedback from users

[Moritz 'morty' Struebe]

And even worse are assumptions! IMHO there are three scenarios:
1) No one sends data: There won't be reasonable results. The experiment 
has failed. No harm done. (IMO unlikely but who knows)
2) Most of the people send data: This does help a lot. It quickly gives 
an overview which features might need integration or whether it makes 
sense to ship a bundled version.
3) All users have to submit data and don't have a choice: A lot of 
bloggers are about security and will complain. I don't think they have a 
problem with sending statistical data but with not having the choice to 
do so. (I am one of them) This will give WP bad press.
4) No statistical data is collected. Worst case! Nothing gained at all.

At the moment I can't come up with other scenarios. I vote for giving it 
a try and let the user choose. After all. If he doesn't want to help he 
can't complain later on.
Cheers
Morty

Dave Pappas wrote:
> "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics"
>
> This is a great topic.  I am sure the effort will produce interesting
> statistics.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure it will produce actionable
> information.  Self selecting surveys are less meaningful then other
> approaches.  My fear is that you are producing a plugin that will be
> installed by a subset of users and of that subset, another subset will opt
> in.  You don't need a large sample size to draw conclusions about the
> population as long as the sample is truly representative of the population.
> Allowing people to opt in or out means you will have a (relatively) small
> sample size that probably does not reflect the entirety of the Wordpress
> installations in the world.
>
> I would still find the information interesting - I just don't think you can
> make decisions driven by what the 'average' WP user has installed.  You
> won't know much about the average WP user - only those who like contributing
> towards these kinds of efforts - like myself ;-)
>
>
> On 9/17/07, Omry Yadan <omry at yadan.net> wrote:
>   
>> Jacob Santos wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Well, if it was simply a plugin that only did that, then I think
>>> anyone who downloads and installs it would do so with the full
>>> intention of agreeing that information would be sent to somewhere. The
>>> only issue is that you must tell them what information is being sent
>>> and nothing like passwords are.
>>>
>>> I would totally install such a plugin. I haven't yet looked at
>>> FireStats to see if it does only this.
>>>       
>> you would if you knew about it, but why would you even start looking for
>> it?
>> something like this should be in the core.
>>     
>>> What else does FireStats do, besides send stats?
>>>       
>> http://demo.firestats.cc/firestats/
>>
>>
>>
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