Stats and surveys

[Mark Doliner]

When grim and rlaager were out here a month ago for the Google Summer
of Code Mentor Summit we met kluge (Casey Ho).  He wrote the
auto-profile plugin, and has been around for years writing small
patches and making suggestions and stuff.  I think I might have an
email printed out from him from like 4 years ago about suggestions on
how to improve the menu items in our conversation window menu bar.  In
general he's interested in making Pidgin and the Pidgin project more
user-friendly.

He pointed out that, while most of us devs tend to have similar coding
ideals (clean code, elegant code, do things the right way whenever
possible, small atomic commits, etc), we're not great at interfacing
with users.  I mean, we're not awful, we try to make Pidgin easy to
use and we have a FAQ with lots of info.  But there are lots of little
things we could probably do to make Pidgin more accessible to the
world.

One of the things we've talked about is collecting statistics similar
to Adium's Sparkle stats[1].  Things like which prpls are being used,
which preferences aren't used, how many people resize their text input
boxes, etc.  Don't worry--we'll make sure it doesn't violate people's
privacy and will at least be opt-outable (if not opt-in in the first
place).

Anyhoo, I gave him commit access and an account on our servers.  I
think he's working on a survey for users to get some high level info
on where people use Pidgin, how long they've been using it, how
satisfied they are, etc.  I'm sure he'll send out an email later, once
it's closer to being ready.

-Mark

[1] http://www.adiumx.com/sparkle/