[mksaunders]

Look at it this way:

* If we had a bad website, people would complain that it's ineffective, and not helping drive people towards FOSS

* If we then add open source analytics tools to try to improve the site, people ask why we are "tracking" them

* If we then add a banner, people complain that we're training people to ignore banners

...so it's hard to get anything right, it seems! We could remove Piwik completely (although it's not my call - I'm just one person in the project). But then it'd be much harder to improve our website. Piwik is really useful and if we want FOSS to be more widespread and adopted, we shouldn't shy away from such tools, IMO.

[jhasse]

You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website.

> We could remove Piwik completely

Yes, please do that.

> But then it'd be much harder to improve our website.

Why?

[mksaunders]

> You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website.

But that's not what I said at all. Please don't just thrown in things like that. I said that analytics tools can be really useful in many ways to help to improve a website (especially a bad one).

You ask "why", well look here at the features that the open source tool we use provides: https://matomo.org/features/

I'm not sure if you've worked in website design before but many of those features are very important and effective for improving a website. If we want to spread the word about FOSS, and encourage more people to use it, shouldn't we try to make the best website we can? While also informing users about the open source tools we use, and having a clear privacy policy about them?

https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/privacy/privacy-policy-...

[jhasse]

Well you put up the three bullet points making it sound like that these are the only options, sorry that I misunderstood you.

> You ask "why", well look here at the features the open source tool we use provides: https://matomo.org/features/

That's more about about why one should use Piwik instead of a different tracking tool.

> shouldn't we try to make the best website we can?

Sure. And IMHO the benefit of not having a banner / tracking outweigh the cons.

[dkonofalski]

You've clearly never done any work (either development or UX) for a website. If you don't know how your users are using your product, there's no way for you improve it. If the people working on the website want real usability data, then tracking is the best way to get it. Focus groups and forced testing can only give you so much information and it's not exactly easy to get a group of people that includes active users of your site.

I know you didn't intend it this way but your response smacks of complete ignorance.