One of the advantages of listing an add-on or theme on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) is that you’ll get statistics on your add-on’s usage. These stats, which are covered by the Mozilla privacy policy, provide add-on developers with information such as the number of downloads and daily users, among other insights.
Currently, the data that generates these statistics can go back as far as 2007, as we haven’t had an archiving policy. As a result, statistics take up the vast majority of disk space in our database and require a significant amount of processing and operations time. Statistics over a year old are very rarely accessed, and the value of their generation is very low, while the costs are increasing.
To reduce our operating and development costs, and increase the site’s reliability for developers, we are introducing an archiving policy.
In the coming weeks, statistics data over one year old will no longer be stored in the AMO database, and reports generated from them will no longer be accessible through AMO’s add-on statistics pages. Instead, the data will be archived and maintained as plain text files, which developers can download. We will write a follow-up post when these archives become available.
If you’ve chosen to keep your add-on’s statistics private, they will remain private when stats are archived. You can check your privacy settings by going to your add-on in the Developer Hub, clicking on Edit Listing, and then Technical Details.
The total number of users and other cumulative counts on add-ons and themes will not be affected and these will continue to function.
If you have feedback or concerns, please head to our forum post on this topic.