[xwiki-devs] [ActiveInstalls][Brainstorming] Sending the number of users/wikis in the ping: a problem?
Hi devs, Right now, during the Active Installs ping we send a certain number of information (http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Active+Installs+Client+...) which allow us to have this dashboard: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ActiveInstalls/ This allows us to have an idea of how XWiki’s usage is moving forward (whether it’s growing, reducing or is stable). This also allows us to try new changes in new XWiki versions and see how that affects the number of active installs, thus validating or invalidating the changes. Since XWiki is a Server software, I was thinking that the number of instances around the world isn't really a good indicator of how much XWiki is used by users. Imagine an XWiki instance with 10K users. Right now it’s counted the same as an instance with 1 user. That doesn’t seem quite right since the instance with 10K users shows a much more important usage of XWiki. Thus I was thinking that we could add sending both the total number of users (from all subwikis) + the number of wikis, for the current XWiki instance. Since the data is anonymous and there’s no way to link it to any company/user, I don’t feel it would generate a privacy issue. WDYT? Thanks -Vincent
On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 11:40 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
Right now, during the Active Installs ping we send a certain number of information ( http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Active+Installs+Client+...) which allow us to have this dashboard: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ActiveInstalls/
This allows us to have an idea of how XWiki’s usage is moving forward (whether it’s growing, reducing or is stable). This also allows us to try new changes in new XWiki versions and see how that affects the number of active installs, thus validating or invalidating the changes.
Since XWiki is a Server software, I was thinking that the number of instances around the world isn't really a good indicator of how much XWiki is used by users. Imagine an XWiki instance with 10K users. Right now it’s counted the same as an instance with 1 user. That doesn’t seem quite right since the instance with 10K users shows a much more important usage of XWiki.
Thus I was thinking that we could add sending both the total number of users (from all subwikis) + the number of wikis, for the current XWiki instance.
While I agree with the fact that number of instance alone is not a good indicator of XWiki’s usage, I also do not see the number of users so significant, because you can have thousand of users that never login to the wiki. More than just volume, what really shows the usage are activities. A good indicator would be to report the number of distinct login during the last 24 hours. Other interesting indicator would be the number of documents (existing, changed, delta between creation/deletion), activity stream could also be a source for measuring the level of activity of a wiki. Btw, measuring the level of activity of a wiki is also a need for farm administrators who needs to detect used and unused subwiki.
Since the data is anonymous and there’s no way to link it to any company/user, I don’t feel it would generate a privacy issue.
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Denis Gervalle SOFTEC sa - CEO
Why not the amount of Activity Stream events during the last month? It's still very anonymous (since we don't know what exactly are these events) and relevant. + the amount of pages view during the last month (a wiki could have a lot of pages view meanwhile it is not edited often) I think these 2 metrics could be good indicators. Thanks, Guillaume 2015-11-09 1:12 GMT+01:00 Denis Gervalle <[email protected]>:
On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 11:40 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
Right now, during the Active Installs ping we send a certain number of information (
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Active+Installs+Client+... )
which allow us to have this dashboard: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ActiveInstalls/
This allows us to have an idea of how XWiki’s usage is moving forward (whether it’s growing, reducing or is stable). This also allows us to try new changes in new XWiki versions and see how that affects the number of active installs, thus validating or invalidating the changes.
Since XWiki is a Server software, I was thinking that the number of instances around the world isn't really a good indicator of how much XWiki is used by users. Imagine an XWiki instance with 10K users. Right now it’s counted the same as an instance with 1 user. That doesn’t seem quite right since the instance with 10K users shows a much more important usage of XWiki.
Thus I was thinking that we could add sending both the total number of users (from all subwikis) + the number of wikis, for the current XWiki instance.
While I agree with the fact that number of instance alone is not a good indicator of XWiki’s usage, I also do not see the number of users so significant, because you can have thousand of users that never login to the wiki. More than just volume, what really shows the usage are activities.
A good indicator would be to report the number of distinct login during the last 24 hours. Other interesting indicator would be the number of documents (existing, changed, delta between creation/deletion), activity stream could also be a source for measuring the level of activity of a wiki.
Btw, measuring the level of activity of a wiki is also a need for farm administrators who needs to detect used and unused subwiki.
Since the data is anonymous and there’s no way to link it to any company/user, I don’t feel it would generate a privacy issue.
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Denis Gervalle SOFTEC sa - CEO _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Guillaume Delhumeau ([email protected]) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project
Thanks for your feedbacks! If you check how all enterprise software out there do pricing, it’s almost always per user. So IMO counting users is a good approximation of the size of an xwiki instance (you don’t create users for nothing in general). It’s an easy figure to get (I can probably implement it in 1 hour), while counting activity is much more complex to do. Also note that it’s possible to regularly clean the AS and if you have a very large wiki you’ll probably want to do this regularly. Counting page views is also difficult from inside XWiki since you’d need to introduce a new table in the DB for it but more importantly it’s going to affect your performances when you save that number. I agree that number of documents could be interesting too but XE by default comes with over 700 and when users install extensions more are added without it being a good indicator of usage of the wiki. Still I think it’s interesting. So what I’m proposing to do right now is sending: * number of wikis * number of users * number of documents * number of AS events (count on the table) I’m not saying it’s enough but let’s talk incremental and we can always add new metrics later on as we learn how to get them. So WDYT about adding those for now? Do you see any privacy issues? Thanks -Vincent On 9 Nov 2015 at 11:29:17, Guillaume Louis-Marie Delhumeau ([email protected]) wrote: Why not the amount of Activity Stream events during the last month? It's still very anonymous (since we don't know what exactly are these events) and relevant. + the amount of pages view during the last month (a wiki could have a lot of pages view meanwhile it is not edited often) I think these 2 metrics could be good indicators. Thanks, Guillaume 2015-11-09 1:12 GMT+01:00 Denis Gervalle <[email protected]>:
On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 11:40 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
Right now, during the Active Installs ping we send a certain number of information (
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Active+Installs+Client+... )
which allow us to have this dashboard: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ActiveInstalls/
This allows us to have an idea of how XWiki’s usage is moving forward (whether it’s growing, reducing or is stable). This also allows us to try new changes in new XWiki versions and see how that affects the number of active installs, thus validating or invalidating the changes.
Since XWiki is a Server software, I was thinking that the number of instances around the world isn't really a good indicator of how much XWiki is used by users. Imagine an XWiki instance with 10K users. Right now it’s counted the same as an instance with 1 user. That doesn’t seem quite right since the instance with 10K users shows a much more important usage of XWiki.
Thus I was thinking that we could add sending both the total number of users (from all subwikis) + the number of wikis, for the current XWiki instance.
While I agree with the fact that number of instance alone is not a good indicator of XWiki’s usage, I also do not see the number of users so significant, because you can have thousand of users that never login to the wiki. More than just volume, what really shows the usage are activities.
A good indicator would be to report the number of distinct login during the last 24 hours. Other interesting indicator would be the number of documents (existing, changed, delta between creation/deletion), activity stream could also be a source for measuring the level of activity of a wiki.
Btw, measuring the level of activity of a wiki is also a need for farm administrators who needs to detect used and unused subwiki.
Since the data is anonymous and there’s no way to link it to any company/user, I don’t feel it would generate a privacy issue.
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
For what it's worth, several of the public xwikis I hosted have huge spam issues and the number of users will be fed by that... Sometimes I have rages and manage to fight against them, but for the platforms it went over 500, I abandoned.... Maybe counting the number of users who have create more than pages is a lot more expressive? I do not find it very convincing to state that access stats cost an amount because they need to be written to the DB. Such analytics should have a way to be streamlined into memory and only written to disk once in a while (even... once every five minutes). Of course, this means there may be some stats loss, but that is ok, crashes are not to be entirely cared for. Paul
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 9 novembre 2015 11:56 Thanks for your feedbacks!
If you check how all enterprise software out there do pricing, it’s almost always per user. So IMO counting users is a good approximation of the size of an xwiki instance (you don’t create users for nothing in general). It’s an easy figure to get (I can probably implement it in 1 hour), while counting activity is much more complex to do. Also note that it’s possible to regularly clean the AS and if you have a very large wiki you’ll probably want to do this regularly.
Counting page views is also difficult from inside XWiki since you’d need to introduce a new table in the DB for it but more importantly it’s going to affect your performances when you save that number.
I agree that number of documents could be interesting too but XE by default comes with over 700 and when users install extensions more are added without it being a good indicator of usage of the wiki. Still I think it’s interesting.
So what I’m proposing to do right now is sending: * number of wikis * number of users * number of documents * number of AS events (count on the table)
I’m not saying it’s enough but let’s talk incremental and we can always add new metrics later on as we learn how to get them.
So WDYT about adding those for now? Do you see any privacy issues?
Thanks -Vincent
On 9 Nov 2015 at 11:29:17, Guillaume Louis-Marie Delhumeau ([email protected]) wrote:
Why not the amount of Activity Stream events during the last month? It's still very anonymous (since we don't know what exactly are these events) and relevant.
+ the amount of pages view during the last month (a wiki could have a lot of pages view meanwhile it is not edited often)
I think these 2 metrics could be good indicators.
Thanks,
Guillaume
_______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
On Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 11:56 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
Thanks for your feedbacks!
If you check how all enterprise software out there do pricing, it’s almost always per user. So IMO counting users is a good approximation of the size of an xwiki instance (you don’t create users for nothing in general). It’s an easy figure to get (I can probably implement it in 1 hour), while counting activity is much more complex to do. Also note that it’s possible to regularly clean the AS and if you have a very large wiki you’ll probably want to do this regularly.
Counting page views is also difficult from inside XWiki since you’d need to introduce a new table in the DB for it but more importantly it’s going to affect your performances when you save that number.
I agree that number of documents could be interesting too but XE by default comes with over 700 and when users install extensions more are added without it being a good indicator of usage of the wiki. Still I think it’s interesting.
So what I’m proposing to do right now is sending: * number of wikis * number of users * number of documents * number of AS events (count on the table)
I’m not saying it’s enough but let’s talk incremental and we can always add new metrics later on as we learn how to get them.
So WDYT about adding those for now? Do you see any privacy issues?
Regarding users, a small improvement that could probably be done easily, and that could be interesting to introduce early, would be to store the last login date in the XWikiUser object. This way, you would be able to select the count of users that have login recently (last month for example) to get a better idea of the real usage. This is also a security information for users. Another easy indicator of activity is the number of document with a recent date, showing that document are being updated regularly, which is clearly expected for a wiki (compare to a simple web site). Regarding the AS, I tend to agree with you that it could be cleaned, making the value of the measurement not reliable, I am not sure it is worth to be logged. Regarding the privacy of those information, if you never make the information correlated with their source, I do not think it is an issue to collect them. But, for the sake of being kind with our user, a configuration to choose whether you just ping, or you also provide additional statistical informations, may be nice to have.
Thanks -Vincent
On 9 Nov 2015 at 11:29:17, Guillaume Louis-Marie Delhumeau ( [email protected]) wrote:
Why not the amount of Activity Stream events during the last month? It's still very anonymous (since we don't know what exactly are these events) and relevant.
+ the amount of pages view during the last month (a wiki could have a lot of pages view meanwhile it is not edited often)
I think these 2 metrics could be good indicators.
Thanks,
Guillaume
2015-11-09 1:12 GMT+01:00 Denis Gervalle <[email protected]>:
On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 11:40 PM, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi devs,
Right now, during the Active Installs ping we send a certain number of information (
http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Active+Installs+Client+...
)
which allow us to have this dashboard: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ActiveInstalls/
This allows us to have an idea of how XWiki’s usage is moving forward (whether it’s growing, reducing or is stable). This also allows us to try new changes in new XWiki versions and see how that affects the number of active installs, thus validating or invalidating the changes.
Since XWiki is a Server software, I was thinking that the number of instances around the world isn't really a good indicator of how much XWiki is used by users. Imagine an XWiki instance with 10K users. Right now it’s counted the same as an instance with 1 user. That doesn’t seem quite right since the instance with 10K users shows a much more important usage of XWiki.
Thus I was thinking that we could add sending both the total number of users (from all subwikis) + the number of wikis, for the current XWiki instance.
While I agree with the fact that number of instance alone is not a good indicator of XWiki’s usage, I also do not see the number of users so significant, because you can have thousand of users that never login to the wiki. More than just volume, what really shows the usage are activities.
A good indicator would be to report the number of distinct login during the last 24 hours. Other interesting indicator would be the number of documents (existing, changed, delta between creation/deletion), activity stream could also be a source for measuring the level of activity of a wiki.
Btw, measuring the level of activity of a wiki is also a need for farm administrators who needs to detect used and unused subwiki.
Since the data is anonymous and there’s no way to link it to any company/user, I don’t feel it would generate a privacy issue.
WDYT?
Thanks -Vincent
devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
-- Denis Gervalle SOFTEC sa - CEO
participants (4)
-
Denis Gervalle -
Guillaume "Louis-Marie" Delhumeau -
Paul Libbrecht -
vincent＠massol.net