[theme-reviewers] Tracking for themes&plugins

[Chip Bennett]

For me, I am against it for several reasons:

1) Free software principles state that users have a right to use software
for any purpose, without disclosing anything to the developer, and that the
end user's purposes take precedence over the developer's purposes. Tracking
inherently violates that principle.

2) Historically, such tracking has a very bad track record of appropriate
disclosure to the end user

3) Historically, such tracking has been used far too often for nefarious
purposes

So, I'm jaded against the entire concept.


On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Ulrich Pogson <grapplerulrich at gmail.com>wrote:

> @Emil Do you have reports from users that is so or is it just experience?
>
> I know that Yoast SEO and EDD have been able to get data successfully.
>
> It is interesting that that three people feel strongly against it. I
> wonder what is so wrong.
> On 7 Feb 2014 23:25, "Emil Uzelac" <emil at uzelac.me> wrote:
>
>> Most users will not opt-in, therefore you will not have enough of
>> feedback anyways.
>> Here's what you can try: http://www.usertesting.com
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Codeinwp <support at codeinwp.com> wrote:
>>
>>> @Ulrich I don't anything in mind now I am just trying to understand what
>>> is acceptable and what is the best way of doing it.
>>>
>>> It would be for example very interesting if I have a theme to know which
>>> is the most used plugin along with it. Also for example in number of
>>> installs, if there are 10.000 downloads on wordpress.org is interesting
>>> to know how many people use actually the theme and how big are those sites,
>>> the same is nice to know if a particular feature is enabled/disabled by
>>> most of the users or not .
>>>
>>> The thing is that in most of the cases users don't provide feedback, if
>>> they don't like something after they download the theme, they look for
>>> another and if there are 2 themes both with 10k downloads but one of them
>>> is still present on 1k sites and the other on 3k it means that 1st one has
>>> some issues ( maybe it's hard to configure properly as per demo ) .
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 10:57 PM, Ulrich Pogson <grapplerulrich at gmail.com
>>> > wrote:
>>>
>>>> What type of information would you track?
>>>> On 7 Feb 2014 22:50, "Codeinwp" <support at codeinwp.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>  Hello everybody,
>>>>>
>>>>> I am thinking for a while at a opt-in tracking solution for our themes
>>>>> and plugins that don't bother users/wp.org, but still help us build
>>>>> better products and understand our users and I haven't seen any debate
>>>>> here, so I am starting it :) .
>>>>>
>>>>> I came across yoast seo plugin which implement an opt-in tracking that
>>>>> tracks : posts/comments/theme used/plugins used/pages/number of users and
>>>>> of course since they receive the tracking request from a site, they can
>>>>> relate those things with thisismysite.com ( no user tracking, unless
>>>>> you subscribe ) .
>>>>>
>>>>> Is this completely acceptable by everyone ?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> theme-reviewers mailing list
>>>>> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
>>>>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> theme-reviewers mailing list
>>>> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
>>>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>> Best regards,
>>>
>>> *Ionut Neagu*
>>>
>>> Head Business Development
>>>
>>> *Codeinwp* | *www.codeinwp.com <http://www.codeinwp.com>*
>>>
>>> *US*:  +1-888-846-1732  | *Skype*: codeinwp
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> theme-reviewers mailing list
>>> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
>>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> theme-reviewers mailing list
>> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>>
>>
> _______________________________________________
> theme-reviewers mailing list
> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wordpress.org/pipermail/theme-reviewers/attachments/20140207/262d7a6d/attachment.html>