On Monday 05 Aug 2013 20:19:45 Robert Hailey wrote:
> 
> On 2013/08/05 (Aug), at 1:57 PM, Matthew Toseland wrote:
> 
> > Freenet has over 900 downloads a day, yet only a small number of nodes are 
> > added to the network.
> > ... a lot of people are downloading Freenet but not reaching the point of 
> > having working opennet nodes.
> 
> Ouch. But how sure is the network size estimate? Mine only sees 6k nodes ATM.
> 
> > So we need to figure out why. My money's on problems with antivirus 
> > software.
> 
> I wonder if this means there are thousands of would-be-nodes that are 
> installed, running, and not initialized (no darknet, no opennet).
> 
> There might be a stat we can collect in this respect.... IMO, we should have 
> a timer that fires if a node has not been initialized after N days (1 day? 
> 2?) that makes a HTTP request to the server saying, "I'm running, but 
> lost"... maybe reporting how many (if any) wizard screens they got through, 
> esp number of FProxy requests (did they even hit the first screen!).

If it was downloaded via Tor or via filesharing etc then it would need to know 
that so that it could not report in. IMHO we need explicit informed consent 
here.

Maybe a checkbox at the beginning of the installation process - before even 
installing Java?

Only a handful of users will tick it, but stats from them would be useful.

[ x ] Tell the Freenet Project how the installation went (warning this will 
make an encrypted connection to our server freenetproject.org).

Or better ... have a 10% chance of asking the user explicitly:

Do you want to help us to improve Freenet? If you click yes, the Freenet 
installer will tell us whether your install of Freenet succeeded, and if it 
failed then at what point it failed. No other information is sent to us, but as 
a bunch of geeks who mostly use Linux, this is very useful information! Only 
click Yes if you downloaded Freenet from our website.

[ YES ] [ NO ]
> 
> If your hunch is right, then we should see near-zero "I'm lost" signals (b/c 
> the software is not getting to the point that it is running).
> 
> If my hunch is right, we'll see a bunch [800-900/month] of 
> running-but-cut-off nodes because:
> (1) maybe the installer-to-browser transition does not work in every case, or
> (2) they close the browser window, and can't find their way back to it (have 
> you seen a "full" desktop & task tray?), or
> (3) they get scared off by some step in the setup wizard.

There are lots of possibilites:
- Ran away before running the installer. Due to AV warnings or lack of 
signature.
- User runs away when realises need to install Java.
- User runs away while installing Java (it can take a while and doesn't always 
show much on screen, can assume it's borked and cancel).
- Problems installing Java.
- Problems installing Freenet.
- Didn't see the rabbit icon / didn't try it.
- Didn't complete the wizard - at what stage did they drop out?

How can we distinguish between them? AFAICS a feedback mode is the obvious way 
to do this.

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