[pmwiki-users] recipe usage statistics

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Sat Aug 30 09:38:52 CDT 2008


On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 02:39:34PM +0200, Peter Bowers wrote:
> But would it be possible to do this in an alternate way?  Perhaps in
> the script that checks for up-to-date recipes could it anonymously
> collect the information of which recipes are installed?  Or some other
> way...
>
> Not only would this help developers, but administrators would also
> have a way of seeing which recipes were most often used (and thus most
> likely to be helpful, although the one doesn't necessarily imply the
> other).  I know as a pmwiki site administrator I would be very
> interested in a list of "top 10 recipes" that other, more-experienced
> administrators are using...

Using ?action=recipecheck would seem to be the best way to do this,
but at the moment RecipeCheck is written such that no site
information is transmitted to the pmwiki.org server.  A site
running RecipeCheck downloads a status file from pmwiki.org --
it doesn't transmit any information _to_ pmwiki.org.

Beyond that, there's really no such thing as "anonymous".  I wouldn't
want to have a registration feature enabled by default without
an administrator's knowledge -- it would have to be something they
would explicitly enable.  (In other words, I have a philosophical
position that most things should be "opt-in" instead of "opt-out".)

The SiteAnalyzer tool on pmwiki.org _does_ allow an administrator
to send recipe information to pmwiki.org, however, so perhaps I
could write a tool that would make use of that data somehow.
We'd then have to encourage site administrators to run
SiteAnalyzer whenever they load a new recipe.  Or, perhaps
we could encourage admins to use the SiteAnalyzer tool instead of
recipecheck (but SiteAnalyzer doesn't work for "private" wikis 
that are inaccessible from pmwiki.org).

There have also been many discussions on the list about providing
some sort of rating or voting system for recipes, but we've never
come to a consensus about what such a thing might look like, so it
really hasn't gone anywhere.

Pm



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