I noticed this the other day with my plugin, hopefully otto will see this!
Oddly enough, not all plugins seem impacted: I noticed today that new versions of plugins from Donncha and Akismet were correctly dated. However, two of my recently upgraded plugin have the wrong date, and I am afraid that automatic upgrade notices were not dispatched.
Let’s add Otto to the topic tags 😉 !
Also, the last updated date doesn’t affect upgrade notifications. It’s only really used for display.
And the stats have nothing whatsoever to do with it, those are entirely independent from everything, more or less. However, remember that the version stats can be a couple days behind reality too. This has to do with the reporting system and when the data gets collated and such.
I tagged a version of theme-check 4 days ago, yet the last updated shows last month
Wow that was quick. Praise the magic tag!
Here : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yd-network-wide-wpml/ (updated today)
and here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yd-wpml-switcher/ (updated few days ago, in 2011)
Possible relationship with upgrade notifications or stats were just wild guesses. There might be something wrong with the readme or whatever, but I don’t see a date field anywhere and it always worked up to now.
The stats here say 100% of users are v.1.0.0 while last week most users were from previous versions so I doubt everyone upgraded : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/myposeo-dashboard/stats/
Same thing here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yd-wpmu-bloglist-widget/stats/ 100% users of latest version all at once.
I don’t mind about the version stats anyway: they’re nice to have, but it’s no big deal if they aren’t completely right. The date thing is a bit more annoying because it can be misleading about the fact that a plugin is being actively maintained.
Thanks for looking into this Otto, and once again thanks for appearing so fast 😉
Re stats: For those two plugins, there aren’t enough active users of either one to produce meaningful statistics.
What you’re seeing is basically the “null” result. To be specific, there’s only two recorded users of myposeo-dashboard (one of which is active) and eight recorded users of yd-wpmu-bloglist-widget (again, one of which is active).
The stats are accurate, to a point. When there’s nobody using the plugin, or nobody that has reported back recently, then stats won’t be meaningful.
That said, the data gathering system is not perfect, and some data may be lost. We only retain the data for a week, tops. So if nobody reports in in that week, then we think nobody’s using it.
The Last Updated date is supposed to be updated from the SVN, but it’s possible that there’s a bug there preventing it from updating sometimes. I’ll try to figure it out. Regardless, that date has no actual effect on anything meaningful like upgrades and such. It’s basically for display purposes only.
Yeah, I was figuring also that the stats might have to do with the small user base of those plugins. What are recorded users? Different IPs that downloaded the latest version or something like that? and what are “active users” then? They don’t show up in the public stats, right? (that would be cool!)
The myposeo thing being a web-service tools, the guys at myposeo told me that there were only 2 users one week ago according to their logs. However they had some user feedback since then so I guess the real user count must be a bit more by now.
Thanks for looking into the date thing. I’m quite sure it’s a recent problem so you might be able to track it down maybe to beginning of 2011. I never experienced any other date issue before, and I’ve been releasing and regularly maintaining 20 plugins, so I would have noticed before, for sure.
And thanks for the explanations.
Recorded users = websites that use the automatic update-check for plugins
Active users = sites that have the plugin activated
Only active users show up in the version stats pie chart.
BTW, there is one way to hork up the time.. If you change the readme file to point to a new stable tag before that tag directory actually exists, then it won’t be able to get the right time on it, if the updater runs on the plugin before you create the directory.
Best to make the tag directory and put the files into it first, and then to update the Stable Tag number in the readme.txt second.
Makes sense, I’ll try that in a couple of days when i tag.
All my stable versions are released in the trunk only. However, it is possible that the readme was previously updated without updating the version or anything in the code (ie to correct typos), could that have something to do with it? (like if the readme file svn serial number does not match? – however I just checked and it does match)
For the recorded/active user numbers, do you think we might get those displayed in the stats or in the extend/plugins Admin tab someday?
Looking into what could possibly have gotten wrong:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yd-wpml-switcher/ says date is 2010-12-23.
Well, according to readme.txt file SVN history the plugin was initially released on 2011/01/03 only.
According to SVN history of root directory, it was created on 2010/12/26
So the displayed date dates from 3 days before that plugin’s directory was even created in the SVN!
Mine plugin is doing the same. Weird. New release and new tag was pushed yesterday but the last updated date still shows May 2010.
But I updated the Compatible to 3.1 and Requires to 2.9. SVN knows the current tag is 1.5 but Last Updated didn’t change.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/current-location/
Requires WordPress Version: 2.9 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.1
Last Updated: 2010-5-12
