There is no way to answer "how many screens run ScreenTinker?". The product is
self-hostable by design, so most installs are invisible to us on purpose — and
should stay that way. This asks once, and reports only if the operator says yes.
The entire payload is three fields:
{ instance_id, version, screen_count }
instance_id is a random UUID minted on first use and kept in app_settings. It
carries nothing about the install; its only job is to let two reports from the
same server be recognised as one server, so a count is a count rather than a sum
of duplicates. That makes a report pseudonymous rather than anonymous, and the
wording shown to operators says so rather than claiming otherwise.
The payload is short on purpose. Every field added costs participation, and
participation is the only thing that makes the resulting number worth quoting.
Player-platform counts were considered and left out: release assets are already
published per platform, so GitHub's per-asset download counts answer "where should
effort go" at zero privacy cost and without asking anyone for anything.
Verifiability is the feature, not the copy. Settings shows the ACTUAL payload this
server would send, generated live from its own data, plus what it last really sent
and when. The payload is built in one function so a reviewer can check it at a
glance, and the test fails if a field is ever added.
Both answers persist. Declining is remembered as 'off' rather than falling back to
'unasked', so the prompt cannot return after an update — re-prompting is how
telemetry earns its reputation and gets patched out.
Collector side is inert unless TELEMETRY_COLLECTOR=1, so a normal install never
exposes the endpoint. Reports upsert on instance_id rather than appending, so an
install reporting daily occupies one row rather than 365 a year. The source IP is
never read or stored — receiving one is unavoidable, logging it would quietly turn
a pseudonymous report into an identifiable one.
Tests pin the negative promises, which are the ones that rot silently: sends
nothing before consent, sends nothing after a decline, payload is exactly three
keys, id survives a restart, a failed send never records a phantom report. Screen
count excludes unpaired provisioning rows, which would otherwise overstate the one
number this exists to state honestly.
docs/telemetry.md documents the payload, what is not sent, how to verify it, and
that any published total is a floor rather than a basis for extrapolation.
1657/1657 pass.
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