[wp-trac] Re: [WordPress Trac] #5066: Make update checking more consumer-friendly

[WordPress Trac]

#5066: Make update checking more consumer-friendly
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 Reporter:  zamoose                |        Owner:  anonymous
     Type:  enhancement            |       Status:  new      
 Priority:  normal                 |    Milestone:  2.4      
Component:  Administration         |      Version:  2.3      
 Severity:  normal                 |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:  has-patch 2nd-opinion  |  
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Comment (by f00f):

 I noticed that there is negative response to that feature mainly for one
 reasons:
 You have missed communicating it. If you transmit data, make the users
 aware of it, tell them what the data is used for and give them a choice.
 I am perfectly ok with sending a list of all my plugins to wp.org, but I
 do not want to expose which of them are active.
 And, as a side note, is it really neccessary to transmit the description
 of every plugin? Just thinking about performance here.

 Solving this via a plugin is a good idea, but not that easy as
 a) you have to go to plugins page to activate it, thus the update-check
 will be done once and
 b) plugins have little access to what's going on in wp_update_plugins().

 Furthermore I like the idea of having a function wp_user_agent() that
 provides Wordpress/$wp_version but can be overridden by a plugin.
 And for the really paranoid I could imagine an option to remove/obfuscate
 the blog url in http requests.

 My plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/anonymous-wordpress-plugin-
 updates/) replaces wp_update_plugins with a version that does not transmit
 plugin-desc etc. and the list of active plugins. It also replaces WP
 version and blog url.
 I also offer making a patch out of if, but I'd rather wait and see how the
 discussion goes on.

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Ticket URL: <http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5066#comment:15>
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