Learning how the Feeds for YouTube plugin is being used helps us better understand our users and their website needs by looking at a range of server and website environments. This allows us to continuously improve our product as well as our Q&A / testing process. Below is the list of information that Feeds for YouTube collects as part of the usage tracking:
- PHP Version: so we know which PHP versions we have to test against (no one likes white screens or log files full of errors).
- WordPress Version: so we know which WordPress versions to support and test against.
- Feeds for YouTube Version: so we know which versions of Feeds for YouTube are potentially responsible for issues when we get bug reports, allowing us to identify issues and release solutions much faster.
- The SERVER_SOFTWARE variable in PHP: This allows us to know which server environments the plugin needs to work in.
- Theme/Plugin names and versions: So we know which themes and plugins to support and test against. Instagram Feed runs on over 1 million websites. While we can’t test with all 50,000+ plugins, we do our best to test against the top plugins from this list.
- Website URL: We use this to keep incoming data separate in our database so we only count a plugin install one time.
- Feeds for YouTube settings: Knowing which settings people are using allows us to determine which new settings or areas of Feeds for YouTube people want us to expand on, and which settings people aren’t using. Any sensitive information (like YouTube account information and email address) are not collected or only used as anonymous information such as the number of connected accounts.
- Site and user count and whether it’s a multisite: This allows us to gauge how important it is to support specific types of multisites like multi-network and similar styles of configuration and gauge how much we need to scale our servers before launching features like author tracking dashboards that are correlated to the number of users on a site using it in terms of scale.
This data is sent once a week using a cron process that runs in the background. It does not affect site speed and performance in any way.