Community Edition Usage Tracking

[resplin]

It helps Alfresco to make better decisions about Community Edition if we have a general idea of how the product is used. This information has been useful in situations such as:

• prioritizing work on Community Edition
• deciding when a security fix should be made available for an old version

We hope that you allow us to collect this information so that we can improve the product.

Alfresco Community Edition version 3 through 5

When the Share UI is loaded, it calls a white pixel image from the Alfresco servers. This pixel is named for the specific version of Community Edition, so that we can estimate version adoption and usage over time. We look at the referrer IP address in order to get a sense for the number of installations of Community Edition running each version.

In 4.0, the pixel URL is: www.alfresco.com/assets/images/logos/community-4.0-share.png

In 5.0, the pixel URL is: www.alfresco.com/assets/images/logos/community-5.0-share.png

There are a lot of limitations to how we collect this information:

• Many installations block the request at the firewall (under-count).
• Looking at the referrer is a weak proxy for installation. Multiple users of the same install might access Share from different links (over-count).

In 4.0 the call comes from: root/projects/slingshot/source/java/org/alfresco/web/scripts/MessagesWebScript.java

        // start logo
        // community logo
        final String serverPath = req.getServerPath();
        final int schemaIndex = serverPath.indexOf(':');
        writer.write('window.setTimeout(function(){(document.getElementById('alfresco-yuiloader')||document.createElement('div')).innerHTML = '\'}, 100);\r\n');
        // end logo

In 5.0 the call comes from root/projects/web-client/source/java/org/alfresco/web/ui/repo/tag/PageTag.java

There is an add-on to remove the pixel here: https://github.com/sumdog/alfresco-tracking-removal

Alfresco Community Edition version 6

Starting in Alfresco Community Edition version 6, the "Pixel Tracking" mentioned above is replaced by a "heartbeat" which reports repository information to Alfresco Software. See the note in ‌.