[wp-hackers] Automatic feedback from users

[Dave Pappas]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics"

This is a great topic.  I am sure the effort will produce interesting
statistics.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure it will produce actionable
information.  Self selecting surveys are less meaningful then other
approaches.  My fear is that you are producing a plugin that will be
installed by a subset of users and of that subset, another subset will opt
in.  You don't need a large sample size to draw conclusions about the
population as long as the sample is truly representative of the population.
Allowing people to opt in or out means you will have a (relatively) small
sample size that probably does not reflect the entirety of the Wordpress
installations in the world.

I would still find the information interesting - I just don't think you can
make decisions driven by what the 'average' WP user has installed.  You
won't know much about the average WP user - only those who like contributing
towards these kinds of efforts - like myself ;-)


On 9/17/07, Omry Yadan <omry at yadan.net> wrote:
>
> Jacob Santos wrote:
>
> > Well, if it was simply a plugin that only did that, then I think
> > anyone who downloads and installs it would do so with the full
> > intention of agreeing that information would be sent to somewhere. The
> > only issue is that you must tell them what information is being sent
> > and nothing like passwords are.
> >
> > I would totally install such a plugin. I haven't yet looked at
> > FireStats to see if it does only this.
> you would if you knew about it, but why would you even start looking for
> it?
> something like this should be in the core.
> > What else does FireStats do, besides send stats?
> http://demo.firestats.cc/firestats/
>
>
>
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-- 
David Pappas
www.claimid.com/djpappas