We’re pleased to announce the rollout of Telemetry in BuddyBoss, a new feature designed to help us understand how our users interact with the platform. By gathering usage statistics, we can make more informed decisions about product updates, feature priorities, and performance improvements—all to serve you better. We know how important privacy is, so Telemetry has been built with options to give you full control over your data sharing preferences. In this article we want to explain exactly what telemetry is, how it works in BuddyBoss and outline what we collect and how we use that data to underscore our commitment to you and your users’ privacy.
What Is Telemetry
Telemetry is a fancy word that describes all of the hundreds of little pieces of data that make up your unique configuration of your platform. Individual data points aren’t particularly interesting on their own but when viewed together across large groups of users these data points can tell a very useful story about how users are using (or not using) BuddyBoss
Telemetry helps us gather insights into how BuddyBoss is used across different environments, which is invaluable in guiding our development. For example, understanding which features are most popular allows us to focus enhancements where they will have the greatest impact. Identifying common configurations and usage trends also enables us to recommend settings and improvements tailored to our customers’ needs as well as identify common configurations to prioritise when performing QA testing that will affect the greatest number of customers. Telemetry allows us to make data-driven improvements, boosting usability, reliability, and functionality across the BuddyBoss Web & App platform.
Your Options for Telemetry Reporting
Our implementation of Telemetry gives you three data-sharing options, ensuring flexibility for your specific needs and privacy preferences:
- Complete Reporting: This level of reporting allows us to include your administrator email and site URL alongside your usage information so that we can start to gather a complete picture of your usage as a customer and contact you in future if we have questions or want to get your feedback or include you in any research our product team might be conducting to enhance the features you are using. Complete Reporting gathers information about features, configuration, and usage patterns—without ever capturing any personal information about your users. This option allows us to offer the best and most relevant service and experience to you as a customer as well as deliver you a better product over time. With complete reporting, everybody wins; we learn about you and get to serve you better as a result.
- Anonymous Reporting: Anonymous reporting sends us the same information about how you use the product as Complete Reporting, except we don’t collect your administrator email or site URL. By choosing this option, your data will be aggregated anonymously with all of the other users who allow usage tracking. We still benefit from understanding how features are used, but it won’t be tied to any specific details about you or your contact. Like Complete Reporting, Anonymous Reporting never collects any personally identifiable information about your users. With anonymous reporting, we get a helpful contribution from you, but we can’t involve you in product research or ask you questions or get your feedback by contacting you in that way.
- Disable Telemetry: If you don’t want to contribute to the improvement of BuddyBoss’s products and services, you can fully disable Telemetry. This option stops all collection of usage data, so with Telemetry disabled, everybody loses. We don’t learn more about how to improve our products and services, and we can’t help you achieve more with your platform! 😿
What Data We Collect
Telemetry is designed to gather information about how you are using BuddyBoss to achieve the outcomes that are important to you and your users. Here’s an overview of the types of data points we gather information on. This is not an exhaustive list but serves as an indication of the sorts of information we are learning about:
- Server Specifications: Information such as web server and database type, available resources, and similar technical details.
- BuddyBoss Products: A list of installed and activated BuddyBoss products, along with activated components and the configuration settings you are using.
- Usage Statistics: Aggregated statistics, such as the number of users, groups, forums, activity posts, and other relevant metrics.
- Plugin & Integration Data: Data on other plugins installed and activated, and statistics for integrations, such as the number of courses or students if using an LMS.
What We Don’t Collect
Our commitment to privacy ensures that the data collected remains entirely free of personally identifiable information about your users. Here’s what we do not collect:
- Personally Identifiable Data: We never collect any information that could personally identify any of your users, regardless of your Telemetry settings.
- User-Generated Content: We never collect any content such as posts, messages, images, videos, documents, or any other content created or uploaded by you or your users. This includes any proprietary content or copyright material that you may deliver on your platform such as course content or membership material. We also don’t gather or collect any data or content that could be used to build a machine learning model or train any AI tools or services.
How We Use Telemetry Data
Our primary use for Telemetry data is to better understand which features and configurations are most popular, allowing us to create and refine tools that meet your needs. This data empowers us to continuously enhance the platform in ways that benefit all users. Whether it’s improving product adoption, enhancing functionality, or helping you achieve your objectives, Telemetry helps us work smarter for you.
We’re excited to launch Telemetry, and we appreciate your role in helping us improve BuddyBoss. Thank you for being a part of BuddyBoss’s journey to become an even more responsive and powerful tool for community building!
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