Haveing an exe report continued usage statisitics about itself lazarus / 8-Other ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Gizmo · 2016-09-20 22:08 Hiya I have an open-source program that is downloaded about 1.5K times a week from sourceforge. But I have no idea how many of those downloaded instances result in repeated use. I was thinking if there was a way, programmatically speaking, of having the exe just ping some kind of anonymous data to me (with the users consent) to somehow signal that this is the first, second, third, 10th, 100th (and son) time the same downloaded exe has been run. I realise there is an ethical question around this (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/225324/is-it-a-good- idea-to-collect-anonymous-usage-statistics-in-a-free-program) but personally, as a developer, I see no harm in wanting to try and assess how useful your program is to people in reality vs how appealing it seems at the download page. If 1.5K people download it a week, but only 5 continue to use it regularly, then it begs the question as to whether its worth continued development, if you see my point? Curious to know if anyone else does this, and if so, how? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Leledumbo · 2016-09-21 08:58 Just do it. Be it ping, http or any other custom protocol, you decide. You can pair the usage number with hardware id or anything else that identifies each user uniquely. Of course you must write the server side app as well, I haven't seen any generic service for this. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jma_sp · 2016-09-21 10:22 Have you implemented an entry in the menu about check for updates? It´s a way to know if someone runs the program and is really interested  in it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- rvk · 2016-09-21 11:13 Or set a checkbox-option "Automatically check for updates" in the menu. (in that case you know how much the program is started/used) (Or maybe jma_sp already meant the "automatic update-check" but that wasn't clear to me)