Usage tracking for Charitable helps us better understand our users and their website needs by looking at a range of server and website environments. This allows us to continuously improve our product as well as our Q&A / testing process.
You can help us by navigating to Charitable Settings -> Advanced in your WordPress dashboard and opt into usage tracking by turning on the “Usage Tracking” option and clicking the “Save” button on the page. This option is also available on the Charitable checklist and the onboarding wizard when you first install the plugin.
Below, you will find a description of what information will be included once you have saved this setting.
- PHP Version: so we know which PHP versions we have to test against (no one likes whitescreens or log files full of errors).
- WordPress Version: so we know which WordPress versions to support and test against.
- MySQL Version: so we know which versions of MySQL to support and test against for our custom tables.
- Charitable Version: so we know which versions of Charitable are potentially responsible for issues when we get bug reports, allowing us to identify issues and release solutions much faster.
- The SERVER_SOFTWARE variable in PHP: combined with an Charitable option called SAS are used to parse out which web hosting companies our users are using. We use this to determine the top hosts users are using and make sure that we have testing accounts with those hosting companies, so we can properly test our new releases with various host environments. This also helps us identify conflicts with specific hosting providers so we know which hosts to work with to fix the issue if it’s a server configuration issue.
- Theme/Plugin names and versions: So we know which themes and plugins to support and test against. Charitable runs on many websites. While we can’t test with all 50,000+ plugins, we do our best to test against the top plugins from this list.
- License key and email and url: If you’re an Charitable customer, then we use this to determine if there’s an issue with your specific license key, and to link the profile of your site with the configuration of authentication to allow us to determine if there’s issues with your Charitable authentication.
- Charitable settings: So we know which settings people are using, allowing us to determine potentially which new settings or areas of Charitable people want us to expand on, and which settings people aren’t using.
- Site and user count and is multisite: This allows us to gauge how important it is to support specific types of multisites like multi-network and similar styles of configuration and gauge how much we need to scale our servers before launching features like author tracking dashboards that are correlated to the number of users on a site using it in terms of scale.
- Campaign and donation information: We anonymously collect general info on total amount of campaigns and donations along with what gateway(s) were used. We do not collect information on individual campaigns or donations and purposely remove any data that we could identify as personally identifiable. For additional privacy we not store access logs on our server so that the IP Address of your site is not connected to your site’s unique ID.
- Usage tracking config: The Charitable option that contains the information on when the usage tracking data-sync will happen (once a week), so we can gauge the server load for the usage tracking servers.
