Originally Posted by Phanx
I hadn't noticed this yet since 99% of my addons are updated through the Curse Client, but I just went and downloaded an addon to see what you're talking about. While the "downloading" page works fine for me, it's still quite annoying. I don't understand how wasting my time (both to load the page and click "back" an additional time) to make me download the file from a separate page gives you "better" download stats than just letting me download the file from the page I'm already on.  |
It allows us to use google analytic events to capture download statistics. Now sure there are some people that block GA or JS altogether but they are a less that 1% minority on our site. I am now working on pulling that data via GAPI and using chartjs to display it in a nice format. Utilizing this instead of building our own system and needing a beefy & expensive mysql server(s) or a mongodb shard(s). Now true we could use the onclick stuff but that gets a little messy as you already know with the minion.gg download button.
This also allows us to serve the CDN link directly with out using a redirect to record the download hit. Before the download was redirected to the CDN url. With the old system we couldn't serve the CDN link directly with out using some redirect because there would be no way to record the download hit since you're downloading a cached file from a server close to you. Now our CDN has those stats but their data isn't all that great or fast, its only provided for billing purposes really.
Now these stats probably aren't all that important to authors right now other than the novelty/curiosity but we are working on something where you'll want to see this data for other reasons.
