George,
I agree with Robert that this kind of 'spying' is likely to be viewed with suspicion. I habitually deny such requests for 'data for quality improvement purposes'. I also dislike products writing stuff to my drive over which i have no/little control.
I can see the attraction of linking this to Forum users.
Afterall, members of the forum most likely have a 'closer' relationship with SPFLite than non-members, and so are more likely to agree to upload data.
However, there are probably many more users of SPFLITE than there are members on this forum, and thus you could be missing out on a whole bunch of "usage-patterns".
I offer some thought below, but I think this is getting a bit too involved.
Perhaps an alternative is to pop-up a panel at installation time, advertising those 'features/aspects' of the product which are "candidates for retirement/removal" and giving users a link to this forum (or an email address) where they can voice their objection. Combined with some kind of 'there's a newer version available' check at startup, this could be just as effective and require less effort on your part.
If you want to go the automated route, my thoughts are....
I think you probably also won't want the process to go on ad infinitum.
Once you have a reasonable representative sample of which features of the product are used/unused, you could stop/prevent further data collection.
You could disable data collection after a specific number of collections have occurred and re-enable collection after a specific amount of time has elapsed.
You may need to introduce a "session count" so you can tell how 'busy' the product is with a particular user - could be they don't use SPFLite a lot and hence their "tracked-feature" count is low.
The upload process (if user permitted) should probably run automatically and should probably clean up the data capture file(s).
Perhaps upload would be triggered when a given number of data collections have occurred and/or in relation to the "session count".
Since you can probably only change the behaviour at installation time, you'd may need to issue an update to change the parameters, time periods, aspects to be tracked, etc..
To ensure that users perform such update in a timely manner, you may need a 'new version check' routine during the dtart-up/initiatlisation process - perhaps once a month.
Perhaps the approach ought to focus on specific product 'aspects', ie. those which you think may be candidates for removal, rather than tracking all features.
There definitely should be an 'Allow/disallow upload' switch, probably on the OPTIONS GENERAL or CONFIG page.
You may need two settings for this - one to permit data collection, another to permit data upload.
In addition, you probably need a pop-up at instalation time, which should:
- explain the concept's rationale and which 'aspects/features' are being tracked
- explain when and how frequently then data will be uploaded.
- show where the collected data files are kept and how to view them (so users can be comfortable with what's being captured)
- remind them that they can change their mind at any time via the OPTIONS dialog
- request permission (YES/NO) - perhaps collection default is YES and upload default is NO so users can see what's being collected.