Cholmondely wrote: ↑Sat Nov 05, 2022 6:27 pmI believe that we are well and truly stuffed in this regard.
1) Even before considering your critique,
It wasn't a critique. It was a question.
I am actually trying to help. Before my previous employer went "software only", from of a field staff of 60-odd users and several thousands client seats, I managed to generate a significant percentage of the company's bug reports just myself, and I only reported things I couldn't work around myself. Developers can't fix bugs they don't know about.
So, previous methods of monitoring have, for reasons variously internal to the project and external, failed. Problematic for all sorts of "prioritise" type questions. If usage stats for ships, stations, small furry Lavian OXPs etc are worthwhile (and this thread suggests they are), what available techniques would provide a reasonable sampling of usage?
Here's 0.02€ worth : modify the code that downloads the (updated) list of expansion packs so that it (optionally, user choice) uploads the contents of ... is it "latest.log" - the last loading log for the installation? to {some friendly location}. Then, the user has elected to have some internet traffic ; the log file is something people seem happy to upload here for debugging ; there might even be a sort-of-unique ID in the log ($ship_name+$commander_name).
How much other "junk" data would that generate? Are the contents of "latest.log" managed by SDL, Oolite code, or a witches brew of the two. In the latter case, would generating "stats.log" from the next (major) version of Oolite be useful, and what data would it need?
I wouldn't be surprised to find the topic has already been flogged to death several times over - but with hundreds of threads and tens of thousands of posts on the forum, I could get a lot older and still fail to find the threads.
A plan "B" - send all forum users a monthly email (I get these from all sorts of mailing lists on the 1st of the month ; probably everyone does), requesting they mail "latest.log" to {someone who is interested} who can parse them to produce whatever statistics are being requested from the "developers" sandpit. Whether that would attract a wider spread than the sesquidozen that other polling gets ... well, one can hope.