[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #6511: Bring back the active install growth chart

[Making WordPress.org]

#6511: Bring back the active install growth chart
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 Reporter:  markzahra         |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement       |      Status:  new
 Priority:  high              |   Milestone:
Component:  Plugin Directory  |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                    |
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Comment (by bfintal):

 @matt & others: If you read all the comments above, most of us plugin
 authors are just after more data for our own plugins so we can understand
 our own plugins better.. all so we can make our own plugins better.

 I for one keep track of this metric for my plugin weekly. I'll paste here
 what I mentioned in one of the threads in Slack:

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 It matters if your rate grew or shrank. Imagine if you put out a change in
 how your plugin - improved a feature, updated your UI, changed the
 location of a major button for example, then after a week or two, you
 notice that the growth chart is going down - this might be an indicator
 that the change might not be good. Why? Because people are uninstalling.
 If it's the same or going up, then you might be good to go. Of course
 there are lots of other factors, like another solution coming in or
 something. But without the chart (and if you have 20k+ active installs),
 you will not know about any of this.

 Now if you think that users will voice out their concerns in the support
 forum, baed on experience, the vast majority of users will not let you
 know their concerns, they will more likely uninstall your plugin or
 something worse like rant in socmed or leave a 1-star rating.. which we
 all don't want.

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 I see security was being mentioned as a cause for the removal. If that's
 the case, make the metric accessible privately to plugin authors, so we
 can understand how our own plugins are doing. Make it so that when a
 plugin author is logged in, that's the only way you can see the data. This
 would also solve the issue of publicly scraping data.

 Also, it wouldn't hurt to provide us with more data about our own plugins
 too. If we really want the plugin ecosystem to thrive, we need to change
 and things need to be a two way street.. you need to help the plugin
 authors and give us more beyond what little data we have right now.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511#comment:33>
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