[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 subscriptiongroup):

 Disclaimer: I am not a plugin developer (of public plugins) nor a core
 contributor, but have been using WP and WC for many years for a business
 that grew from nothing to multi-million thanks to WP, WC and various
 plugins both made internally and some bought from marketplaces. I have no
 intention of swaying in either side of the argument, but will write the
 below to offer some food for thought - take them or leave them, but please
 don't take my comments personally if you disagree.

 We are now in the process of re-platforming to Shopify and there are many
 reasons behind this, with core and plugin performance being the biggest
 contributing factor. We do this knowing there are limitations, lack of
 flexibility, additional costs and loads more.

 I am not a Shopify expert, but as a system architect, one area they seem
 to be winning, is marketing and lack of transparency. If you look at their
 app store, there are no install details, only reviews and even big plugins
 have less than 1000 reviews, even though they claim to have thousands of
 users.

 To the average joe, who's not a developer, Shopify looks ideal because
 it's SaaS, easy to install, fast, secure, extendable and even people who
 struggled with WP/WC have created a Shopify site with minimal dev
 assistance. Have you tried googling anything related to them or their
 plugins being hacked to see what results you get? Negligible compared to
 what you get on the WP ecosystem where "security" companies fight for
 who's the best, and in many cases use false data or exaggerate on their
 findings.

 You then see people arguing about everything, from small to large issues.
 I remember the days people (myself included) argued against Gutenberg,
 even considered forks of WP, yet for the past year, we've been using it as
 the only editor for our WC store, and have even moved to FSE, something
 you get out of the box on other platforms.

 On the topic of showing the installation statistics, have you actually
 wondered if those are truly accurate? We have our main site and 6 staging
 environments (often more), running 24/7. Can anyone confirm if those are
 excluded from the stats, because if they are not, they are skewing the
 active installs. If they are excluded, are there any particular rules for
 it? So do they only exclude installations that exist on localhost and ones
 that include "staging" or are they clever enough to exclude all duplicate
 sites? I've used a number of paid plugins that gave you free installs on
 stagings, that didn't exclude all our stagings and had to contact their
 support to have them removed.

 Those charts look cool and a plugin with loads of installs is probably
 great, but can you really trust it without knowing who's actually using
 it? A plugin that's used by thousands of WP sites will probably not fit
 our needs, because those sites are likely much smaller than we are and
 probably have just a few visits per day (like millions of sites out
 there), yet the average user will install it thinking it's great.

 Personally, I think giving plugin developers those stats for their own
 plugin is a must-have, it should be granular and should include some
 additional details where available, but I wouldn't display those charts
 publically, because they can harm a plugin, or make it look better (and
 safer) than it really is. On sites that have the tracking option enabled,
 I would even consider passing (some) details to the plugin developers.

 WP/WC needs quite a lot of changes, (especially in marketing) otherwise,
 it risks losing even more sites to other platforms, at which point (if not
 sooner) developers will start abandoning it and those charts will be
 useless anyway.

 fun fact, some weeks ago, I was looking at a plugin and noticed the chart
 had a strange installation pattern. Around the start of each month, it had
 a massive spike, then numbers kept going down for the next few days, until
 they reached a quite low number and hovered around it till the start of
 the next month. At the time, I thought "that's odd", but i didn't think of
 taking a screengrab and i can't remember which plugin that was. My
 thinking is those figures were skewed by someone/something spawing new WP
 sites automatically and using that plugin every month, for who-knows-what
 (maybe reporting?). Can anyone categorically confirm if this was a one-off
 example and if those stats we're arguing about are really indicative of
 active WP sites that are actually visited by humans? Seems to me that even
 Automattic cannot (or possibly are aware of bots), so I wouldn't have much
 faith in those charts, or even the active installs.

 Another thought for plugin developers who offer a "pro" version. Could
 those "fake" installs (assuming my theory of including stagings in those
 numbers is correct) explain why you see a low conversion rate? If my
 business uses your plugins and we account for 7 of your installs (as
 explained above), you'd probably be thinking "what can i do to get those 7
 sites to pay", but in reality, the answer is "nothing"...

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6511#comment:82>
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