[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Find out active XE installations

Hi devs, I think it would be interesting for us to know how many people install and use our software. Of course we'd need to do this in a non intrusive manner that adds value for the user. Here's an idea Ludovic and I have discussed: * In the administration page add a blog panel by default (replacing the create page panel for ex which IMO isn't needed there) showing the last 5 RSS feeds from xwiki.org -> This is useful for the admin users since they need to know the latest versions and news about the software they use -> They can remove the panel easily if they don't want to see news -> We can generate a unique id based on the user's system (http://johannburkard.de/blog/programming/java/Java-UUID-generators-compared… ) so that we can identify active installs We could then define what we call an active install (say a ping at least once every month for ex) and we can find: - how many new installs per day/month/year - how many users stop using xwiki after some time and what the average time it's used actively Obviously we won't get perfect data (people will remove the panel, others won't be connected to the internet, etc) that but it seems to me it would a good guess. Once we get this data we could display it on xwiki.org (we could even display it in the stats space with the other data). WDYT? Thanks -Vincent