I agree that obtaining overall usage statistics would be useful to enhance development and overall project management. I’ve thought about it as well.
One challenge is that I think we would need to be transparent on what data is collected and why. I think we would need to be careful not to collect any data that could be sensitive.
I fear an explicit “opt-in” system could limit the utility, as I fear the set of users that explicitly opt-in may not be a good representation of the overall user base - thus skewing the gathered results. One thing I was thinking about would be to combine some kind of “future central plugin server” with “overall stats gathering”. Basically, some kind of two-way info exchange with the central server (simple usage statistics sent up, and available plugins/versions sent back). That may make it more likely that gathered statistics are more representative of the overall usage. Not sure.
If we publicly provide the statistics, I think we’d want a second layer of anonomization on the server side before making the data public. Just to be extra careful that collected data isn’t used maliciously.
Just some high-level ideas.
Cheers,
-Kevin