Many of you know the importance of analytics(PA modding being web based, and analytics being a big part of web dev). I was wondering if there is a policy on sending back analytics on mods(Just on the injected HTML you add, not the whole game view). I was thinking of doing this but only if the user checks a check box on first time startup. Why analytics are important: They let you see how the user, uses your mod. For example, maybe you have this awesome feature but it is not obvious that it exists, but because you have analytics you see this. To fix this you add a more obvious button, now people use this awesome feature that you spent so much time on. Without analytics you would have never known Afterthought: Analytics framework? Instead of having every single mod send individual data you just register your mod with an analytics framework and it sends back data in more compressed standard packets. This also allow for a more guaranteed way of moderating analytics, the framework would always give the options to control your data instead of having it be an honor system for modders. -Thanks Brian for bringing this up
Nifty idea, but a little concerning. People are real crazy about their data these days. There's also the concern of every single mod sending data and increasing the load. Some people can't afford that. And some people have internet bandwidth caps.
A single analytics mod could collect this information and pass it along. Now if only we had some kind of statistics gathering mod that anyone could submit code changes to...
The problem is that not everyone might want all those features that PA Stats provides, I'm looking into making a small analytics mod that only provides mod stats. There will be an analytics server(Probably running on Heroku) that anyone can interact with via a RESTful style api.
