It gives me no joy whatsoever to have to post this.
A little over 100 plugins recently were impacted by a stats gathering change. This means those plugins had their active install stats seemingly adjusted downward.
We understand this was painful for a number of developers and we held off on announcing this as we were still doing a bit of triage and making sure it was blocked. We are sorry about that confusion.
What happened?
Recently, it was pointed out that the active install counts of several plugins appeared to be inflated artificially. When we looked at the raw data, we found that this was correct for roughly 100+ plugins; fake update data was being sent to us.
This is not unusual, it’s happened before, although people are usually much more blatant about it, which is why it took a long time to notice it. In any case, we adjusted our stats mechanisms to ignore these, and so those 100+ plugins will have seen a drop of around ~8000 installs.
As the data was being faked before, this new count is more accurate. But it doesn’t change the old counts, and we can’t redo those counts as we don’t store that raw data for more than 2 days.
@Otto42
Will this happen again?
Probably. This specific attack won’t, as the folks with server power on WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ are outstanding. However about once every other year someone tries to do stuff like this. We usually catch on to them a little faster and block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. them. Now that we know about this one, we’ll add it to the list of things to monitor and block. But yes, people love munging with stats, they’ll certainly try it again.
Why didn’t you post right away?
We were asked not to while people were still working on stopping it, and then we didn’t want to while we were investigating the root cause. Basically we didn’t want to announce it until we had all the facts.
Can you tell us exactly what happened?
No, we cannot. We’ve learned that telling people exactly how we caught what they did, or even just what they did in details, leads to them doing it again in a slightly more clever way. Right now, they have no idea how we solved it, and that’s just fine.
How many users did I lose?
The Active Install count for affected plugins would be decreased by somewhere between 1 and 8 thousand. Depends on the plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. And yes, we know that’s a galling number.
Were any of them valid users?
We can give you 100% assurance that no, they were not. The counts were inflated, so the number it shows now is much closer to the true active install count.
My plugin was impacted – am I in trouble?
No. If you were the culprit, your plugin would be already closed, your account banned, and you got a stern email from us about why you were banned for doing that, and you’re not welcome here anymore. If all of those aren’t true, we know you didn’t do it, and you have not a single thing to worry about.
Will a big drop in usage hurt my plugin popularity?
Not really, no. Please keep an eye on the big picture for a moment:
- If you wants stats to be useful then they have to be accurate, right? Well, we fixed that.
- The majority of end users don’t look at the charts that actually show the massive drop, they just look at the full usage count. And no, they don’t remember what you had yesterday.
- You can point people here to explain “Someone else was a right prat and messed up stats for a lot of us.”
In the long run, this will even out and no one will notice. If you’re worried about your popularity, make sure you have a good readme that explains why someone wants the plugin and how to use it. That will help you much more than numbers or charts.
Did this impact historical data?
You mean from last month? Yes. Sadly. It’s been going on a while, like for most of the year. We don’t keep old stats like that in a manner that allows us to clean this up, so that’s why it looks like you had a big drop. At best we could force edit everyone impacted and drop them by X amount going back to when we think this started, but that doesn’t really change much, it just moves the weird needle back so it looks like a month or whatever ago, you had a massive drop.
There’s also the fact that the climb was a slow creep. We know the end volume of fake usage only because we saw the drop like you did. We could guess at how much it grew a month that was fake, but you run a higher risk of looking worse, like you were loosing 100s of users a month for a year.
Finally … asking us to manually edit your stats is a pretty terrible precedent. We don’t do that. We should never do that.
Why don’t you keep old data?
Two reasons: Privacy and size. We delete tracking data for your privacy, but also because with millions of sites out there, it’s heckin’ huge! Like “What comes after Petabytes?” huge. (Answer: exabyte, now you know.)
Can you undo this?
According to what I’ve been told, no. By blocking the fake data source, the stats automatically adjusted. The only way anyone would possibly be able to revert it would be to restore the fake data. We feel that is a terrible suggestion, as that would be intentionally lying to your users.
Who did this?
We are not about to disclose that. It’s being handled, and we are not in the business of dog-shaming people, nor encouraging mob-mentality to attack them.
If I didn’t do it, why am I being punished?
You’re not. Your plugin stats changed when we blocked the cause for the inaccurate counts. No one on WordPress.org has manually adjusted numbers. Basically we said “data like this is invalid” and when the counter recounted, which happens every day, those plugins were impacted.
This isn’t fair!
It’s equitable. Everyone who had their stats incorrectly inflated were corrected when we removed the data source.
I have some suggestions and ideas about how to fix this, where can I post those?
I am so glad you asked! The best way is to join us to be part of the ongoing solutions! And the easiest way to do that would be to come on over to help the META team. See, plugin reviews is just plugin reviews. But Meta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress.? They do the heavy lifting of making the WordPress.org experience better for everyone. And, perhaps not shockingly at all, it’s mostly PHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php. and JS. Yes, that’s right, WordPress.org runs on WordPress!
Meta has a meeting every other week in #meta on Slack. You can keep tabs on all meetings via https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/
Also if you have a fully formed idea, that you think is a good proposal, head over to https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ and make a ticket. If you have detailed screenshots and example code, all the better.
#statistics
