1. The benefit is not in knowing absolute numbers of installation base, it's in knowing the ratio of installations to sample size. if 50% of all participating users have Foo installed, ant 20% of all participating users have Bar installed, you should be able to gain a high level of confidence that Foo is more prevelant "in the wild" then Bar

If 0.005% of all participating users have DBIx::Simple installed, it will probably not even show up in the statistics. As I said, this is only a possibility if the total number of users is more than huge.

2. At no point prior to your message has any one described a way by which this functionality could be hooked into MakeMaker, with an Opt-Out, which would be obvious to people who don't know they should look for it because they just upgraded module Foo without any idea that the new version of Foo is submitting this data.

I have said that a message would be given, that the script would wait for 10 seconds and that the way of opting out would be made very obvious.

3. In general, I'm a big believer of "Opt-In". I rarely encounter something that's "Opt-Out" which doesn't piss me off by the nature of being "Opt-Out"

*In general, I agree. However, most of the time it is because the opting is for receiving offers, news and spam. It is because they will know my mail address or my name. It is because they might gather information and keep a file of just me. It is because *personal information* is sent.

However, I do not believe that any of the information that I wish to collect compromises privacy or security in any way. The only more or less sensitive information would be the IP address. But even that information cannot be used for anything other than statistics. Of course, I will not save the IP address, as that information is not relevant to what I want to know.

Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Gathering module usage statistics by Juerd
in thread Gathering module usage statistics by Juerd

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