ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Options page > Settings for reporting usage statistics

Settings for reporting usage statistics

Only ANY-maze administrators can alter whether usage statistics are reported.

Introduction

ANY-maze collects anonymous information about which features of the software you use. In order to help with future development, this information can be sent to the ANY-maze software team for analysis.

Details

We are continually improving ANY-maze and adding new features. In order to help us decide where best to target our efforts, ANY-maze can collect anonymous information about the features that you use. This information can then be sent to our software development team, where it will influence the areas of the software they focus their efforts on. For example, if we're thinking of improving a specific feature, then the priority we give to that feature will depend on the number of people using it.

What information is collected?

Note that we are only looking at how many people use different features, and the frequency with which they are used - we're not looking at anything specific to an experiment. For any given experiment, we gather quite a lot of information - things like how many Zones are used in the experiment, how many tests are run, how many apparatus you use simultaneously, or the type of results which you look at. The important thing to remember is that there is nothing personal in this information - for example, the experiment notes or names of treatments are deliberately not included.

If you want to see exactly what will be sent to us, you can look at the contents of the C:\ProgramData\ANY-maze folder on your computer; all the information collected is stored in files with a file extension of .afl. These files will be zipped up and sent to us when ANY-maze is run; this will happen in the background and won't affect the operation of the software.

Note that this folder is a 'hidden' folder by default under Microsoft Windows.

What if I don't want to send you any information?

If you'd rather not send information about your ANY-maze usage to the development team, that's fine - you can see how to turn off the data collection below. But bear in mind that if we don't have information about which features of ANY-maze people are using most, we won't be able to effectively target which areas to work on. In the worst-case scenario, we may decide in future to drop features from the software that we don't think anyone is using - so if you're using a little-used part of the software, and we don't know about it, then it may disappear in a future version of ANY-maze!

My computer isn't connected to the internet; what happens then?

If your computer is not connected to the internet, then ANY-maze will still collect the usage information - but it will never be sent to us. Periodically, the information that is collected will be deleted, to prevent it taking up too much space.

Changing whether information is sent to ANY-maze

You can access the Usage statistics settings, to specify what information is sent to us, by selecting the Options page and then clicking the Usage statistics option in the left-hand side bar.

Figure 1. The Usage statistics settings on the ANY-maze Options page.

You can choose here whether or not to Allow ANY-maze to report usage statistics. Selecting this option will cause information about how you use the software to be collected, and periodically sent to the ANY-maze development team. If this option is not selected, then no usage statistics will be gathered or sent.

ANY-maze help topic T0964