Learning how the Reviews Feed 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 the Reviews Feed 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.
- Revies Feed Version: so we know which versions of Reviews Feed 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. 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.
- Reviews Feed settings: Knowing which settings people are using allows us to determine which new settings or areas of Reviews Feed people want us to expand on, and which settings people aren’t using. Any sensitive information (like connected API information or tokens, and email addresses) 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.
