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Comment by withinboredom

1 month ago

I can't remember where I saw this before. However, there was a site that collected analytics data client side in a circular buffer (or something), and there was a menu in the settings to send it back one-time or always, or download it yourself. If you experienced an error, they would pop up in a toast to share the analytics data with them so they could help fix the problem. You could, of course, decline.

That was probably the best system I'd seen, but I can't remember what site it was.

On macos (maybe tiger or leopard era), apple used to pop up a crash dialog, with a "send to apple?" prompt. And you could say no.

they did away with that.

I built the same for my browser extension (effectively dead product) -- would love to see if this pattern has a name so I can share it more widely!

Maybe the Datadog Flare works like this?

  • The first time I used a flare with their support agents, it truly felt like magic. It's such a clever way to perform data collection for a specific, imperative need without doing a dragnet of constant use telemetry (as far as I'm aware)