Thanks for the feedback and the participation in the survey!
Seeing that there aren’t major concerns, we’ll be moving forward with a trial of Plausible.
As @avsm said, we plan on self-hosting it on the OCaml.org infrastructure to respect our commitment to not use any third-party service. This means that not only we won’t be collecting any personal data, but even the aggregate data will never leave the OCaml.org infrastructure.
There’s roughly a third of people who are against adding analytics to OCaml.org in the survey above. We strongly believe that Plausible is aligned with our commitment to protect OCaml.org visitors’ privacy, but I’ll echo @avsm in saying that if people believe that this is not the case, I’d love to hear about the specific concerns and ideas for alternatives.
To answer some questions above:
Are you going to give a public access to the Plausible statistics ? Or will it be only for the maintainers i.e. Tarides ?
The analytics dashboard will be public.
Have you considered running a server-side analytics service?
Yes, @JiaeK actually worked on a server-side analytics service as part of her Outreachy internship in 2021 and had made fantastic progress. The WIP dashboard is available at https://ocaml.org/dashboard.
It currently doesn’t collect any data and only logs unique page accesses.
We had planned on building on top of this, but as you can imagine this is a large project, and the OCaml.org team has been prioritising improvements to the site itself.
I found the following to be a good read on the pros and cons of server-side vs client-side analytics: Client side vs server side analytics: What’s the gap in data? | Plausible Analytics
TL;DR for all its benefits, server-side analytics comes with a load of drawbacks and isn’t fundamentally more privacy-friendly than privacy-oriented client-side analytics solution.
That being said, if someone would like to contribute to the Dream analytics dashboard to make it usable as an alternative to other analytics solutions, I’d be more than happy to move towards this! Don’t hesitate to reach out to me or other OCaml.org maintainers about that.