Observation on The Lack of Census Data

[JerryFTW]

Howdy folks,

I rather like reading up on census data for WoW, and only just now did I start reading the forum here. It seems that a significant portion of discussion is how to increase the reliability of the results. Most solutions encourage increasing the breadth of features or simply spamming the official forums.

However, one other person mentioned a feature that is lacking in the core program. Granted, it has been supplemented with other addons, but that necessitates further research.

A simple solution to encourage submission is to minimize the effort involved by the end user. Most casual players want to sit down, login, play, and logout. The current program requires that the end user voluntarily submit census data. If they wish to automate this process, it requires further research, installation, configuration, and reliability concerns.

Granted, automatically submitting anonymous data to a remote server is not enjoyed by most people, it is tolerated if the source and program are both trusted. By passing off responsibility for this to a relatively unknown and untrusted program works against the goals of this program. Integrating it directly into the functionality of the program helps instill trust in the user, and increases the likelihood they'll submit data.

While many options are available, and certainly they can help, the simplest way to get more reliable data is to make it easier for more people to collect that data. The harder you make it, the less you'll get.

Jerry

P.S. This is not an admonition of the efforts put forth by this community and the project as a whole, it's merely put forth to emphasize the importance of this limitation towards furthering the goals of the project. You can't change the human spirit - instead, work with it. That's what makes a good program great.

[Balgair]

The problem is that to automatically submit the data would require a .exe file to be a part of the Census package, which in turn would ensure that more people do not install it, because they (quite rightly) want to take no chances with viruses/risking getting banned for running illegal programs in conjunction with WoW. Not that such a program would be either of those; I have the utmost trust in Rollie and his work, but you have to look at it from the viewpoint of the average person, who is told to avoid .exe files in addons for just those reasons.
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[Hybuir]

Additionally with the UniUploader we've run into issues where it's auto submitted and due to the nature of the program (no auto purge/prune) large files are submitted very frequently and actually back up the processing queue (cough cough)
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[JerryFTW]

Right, that's why a unified solution would be best. It can be optimized to meet the project's specific needs.

Offer both - an auto uploader and not. Those that wish to still participate can, and those of a lazier persuasion (myself included) would still be able to contribute.

[Rollie]

It would seem to me that using Uniuploader would work fine?

I do with there was a more unobtrusive way to get data, but without writing a custom exe, I'm afraid we'll just have to rely on user submissions.

[Dromic]

[aker]

I just started running census again. With Uniuploader setup, all I have to do to submit is reload the ui and it takes care of it. (handy fubar plugin for that)

Now if there would be a way to write the data w/o reloading the ui, I would be a happy boy.
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