[Sparkle] profiling behavior

[Mark Munz]

I've been using Tom's Sparkle-Plus for a while and one of things I've
been looking to change is the repetitive posting of stats, which can
skew the numbers. If I check for updates 100 times, my information
floods the statistics.

There seem to be a few options to tackle this issue:

1. send a unique ID (to prevent duplicate entries). This has some
potential privacy issues, although if you send an ID that can't be
traced back to a specific user, I don't think it's a huge issue.

2. only send the data if it is new or changed from the last time. This
would check the data to be sent and compare it to the last set of data
sent. If it changed in some way, resend it, otherwise don't. This
could be stored in preferences which could still lead to some
duplication, but nowhere near the send data with every request.

3. finally, only send the data every 30 days. This is a simpler
version of #2, but would dramatically reduce duplication and would
give a more accurate snapshot of your current active user-base by
sampling them roughly every 30 days.

Before I go forward with changes, I wanted to check to see if this was
an issue that has already been or is planned to be handled for 2.0
(1.5?) before I try and tackle the issue myself.

I appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Mark

-- 
Mark Munz
unmarked software
http://www.unmarked.com/