Hi guys,
As not everyone might be on steering-discuss yet, forwarding it here
We can discuss it on sc-discuss then
So let me try to do that [ I believe I'm subscribed now ]
From: Anthony Papillion <papillion@gmail.com>
> I had posted this in the wrong mailist and intended it here.
>
> I have just been informed that the registration page has been removed
> from LibO. All it took was on bug report to have it removed.
It was removed before the first Beta; correct.
> Did I miss something? I don't remember a good and deep debate about
> this. Removing the registration page, in my opinion, is short-sighted.
Personally; I prefer to have the debate framed in terms of whether we
should add something like that back.
While it's true that it is a nuisance
In the commenter's words - it is indeed a nuisance. Here is at least my
rational:
* Cons of registration page
+ It makes OO.o look like some shareware / marketing-ware thing
+ It clutters our startup, with extra confusing clicks
+ It has some annoying "annoy me again later" option you have
to carefully avoid.
+ There are real privacy, data collection and storage issues
around the data that is entered
+ LibreOffice currently has no infrastructure to register and
store that data at all, never mind in a compliant way
+ Very many people will simply ignore it, thus giving us only a
subset of users, and presumably those who care little for
their privacy
+ Ubuntu had a -massive- flamewar before removing a somewhat
more defensible dialog about something very similar, and
currently do not ship with this dialog cf.:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10044054-92.html
* Pros of registration page
+ It allows us to collect data on people that have no problems
entering their personal information into this sort of thing
+ we could (hypothetically) use that data for something
Maybe even just a name and state/country collector? Removing the
data collection point altogether will create a huge blind spot
between us and our users.
So - I really don't think this creates a huge blind-spot. I would be
amazed if Mirrorbrain cannot give us state/country information and
breakdown from its list of IP addresses that it re-directs for
downloads. Peter is some kind of wizard - so I suspect we can get this
now. Failing that we know our approximate geographical penetration from
the font analysis work.
We can also get a similar set of data we can analyse geographically by
looking at hits on our link to the extensions repository.
So - in summary ... putting this 'back' is not a free operation - it
takes real work, it also annoys real users (including some of the
commenters, and me too FWIW ;-).
Now - the migration page - that is different, we have a plan to fix the
issues Mechtilde carefully identified there, and I need to execute on it
(working ...
HTH,
Michael.