Anonymous usage reporting

[gak]

To help improve Gravit, it would be good to know how many Gravit's there are out there, and how it is used.

[FrMo]

I can see your point, but we should be careful about people's privacy.

Actually there are a lot of people out there who do not like any software to "phone home" without explicit permission. Opening an internet connection without asking the user could raise strange alert messages from personal firewalls, and invite people to fantasize about being tracked behind their backs...

I can imagine two possible ways:

• the installer could open a special website; this could allow us to track the number of installations per operating system.
• ask users if they allow gravit to send anonymous usage statistics, similar to microsofts "user experience improvement" stuff).

cheers and a happy new year, Frank.

[FrMo]

another idea: use a simple survey page, asking questings like

• gravit version
• OS
• main usage (screensaver, write own spawn scripts, etc...)
• what would you like to see improved in the next release?

This should also give us a better idea how gravit could be improved.

[gak]

I should have written this in the issue, but my intention was to ask the user if they want anonymous usage reporting on their first run. I would describe to the user that it will help shape Gravit. Basically similar to how Google, Microsoft, etc ask their users.

[FrMo]

yep, that sounds better for me.