ccagle8 Wrote:I have been asked a lot over the last few months (turning into years) about what type of people are using GetSimple, and how they are using it. I never had answers, and I knew even if I polled the great community members in these forums, I would never see the whole picture.

In response to that, I've created a plugin that will be included in the 3.1 core that submits completely anonymous data back to our servers so that we can see the how/who/why/where (in completely anonymous data chunks) people are using our wonderful CMS product.

Once 3.1 has been out for a while, I will crunch the data and share with the community what we've collected. I feel this can be some very interesting data even though one submission is nothing to shake a stick at by itself - it will be very telling data when they are all aggregated together.

For starters, I want to assure everyone that there is absolutely no way I/we can tell who is submitting this data. Below is the type of XML file that gets sent to our servers. This is it - no other hidden data being sent - absolutely nothing else.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<data>
<submission_date>2011-12-08T08:16:38-05:00</submission_date>
<getsimple_version>3.1B</getsimple_version>
<language>en_US</language>
<timezone>America/New_York</timezone>
<php_version>5.2.17</php_version>
<server_type>FreeBSD</server_type>
<modules_missing>["ZipArchive"]</modules_missing>
<number_pages>18</number_pages>
<number_plugins>4</number_plugins>
<number_files>44</number_files>
<number_themes>1</number_themes>
<number_backups>2</number_backups>
<number_users>1</number_users>
<domain_tld>info</domain_tld>
<install_date>02-11-2011</install_date>
<category>Internet</category>
<link_back>yes</link_back>
</data>

This is the data from the get-simple.info installation of GetSimple.

Let me explain a couple fields: The "install_date" is taken from the filetime of the /data/.htaccess file (which should never get overwritten during normal updates). This is meant as just a rough estimate - but should be useful information none-the-less. The "category" field is an optional dropdown that people can choose or not choose to set.

There are a few other software packages that do this too... DokuWiki comes to mind - so GetSimple will not be the odd piece of software that does this when no one else does.

Also, I'd like to make note that I purposely did NOT make this plugin i18n compatible. This is because due to the sensitive nature of this plugin, I wanted to make sure that the text stayed in my words, and not through a translator. I trust our developers, I just prefer to make sure the text stays mine.

Please add comments & problems to the plugin below. This plugin will only be compatible to GetSimple version 3.1 and higher.

I hope everyone understands how this data will be very beneficial to us understanding our users. Thanks!

0zz Wrote:but will not be obligatory