Plugin usage metrics

[baris]

Hi Everyone,

We are going to be introducing a plugin usage metrics system in 1.13.0. Up until now, the plugins page at admin/extend/plugins#download showed all plugins published to npm with no way to see if the plugin was compatible with your version of NodeBB. This lead to the installation of plugins that might potentially crash your nodebb on startup.

To change this, we are adding a new opt-in system that submits the plugins that are active on your forum to nbbpm.

Here are some details about this system:

• Only submit in production mode (global.env === 'production')
• Submit data once every 24 hours
• Do not submit data for plugins that have "private": true in their plugin.json
• Enabled on new installs, unless disabled during ./nodebb setup
• Disabled on existing installs

You can see the exact data that is submitted here.

You can opt-in or out anytime from /admin/extend/plugins. If a plugin has no compatibility data available it will show a warning like this

If the plugin has compatibility data it will show a notice like this

[julian]

Keep in mind we wanted to make this process as transparent as possible. We want to address continued concerns that our plugin directory often contained plugins that were not actually compatible with the version of NodeBB running.

To that end, this system is default opt-in on new installs (a question is asked during the setup phase). For pre-existing installs, there is an upgrade script that default toggles this option to off. We don't want to surprise anyone here, so the logic is kept completely open-sourced, and new behaviour isn't toggled on for anyone who is using NodeBB already.

We intend to use this anonymized data to allow for automatic reporting of plugin compatibility, and to hopefully lead to better and higher quality plugins as the program matures

[gotwf]

Awesome.

Thanks bunches for this.