About this data

Valence is built by people who cannot see how it is used. These figures are how they find out which systems to test on, which graphics hardware to support and when an old version can be left behind, without asking anybody to give up anything about themselves.

What a server sends, once a day

  • A random id the server made for itself, which says nothing about who runs it
  • The Valence version, how it was installed and which database it uses
  • The operating system, its release and the processor architecture
  • The processor’s model name and how many cores it has
  • Roughly how much memory there is, as a range such as 16 to 32 GB
  • The graphics hardware and which hardware video backends work on it
  • Roughly how big each library is, as a range such as 100 to 999 films
  • Which kinds of app have watched in the last 30 days, again only as a range

What is never sent or kept

  • The address the report came from. The site never writes it down
  • The browser or program that sent it
  • Any name, title, file, path, account, person or place
  • Anything about what anybody watched, or when

How a single server stays hidden

Only totals are ever shown, here or through the JSON the page is drawn from. Any answer fewer than three servers give is folded into “Other”, so an unusual graphics card or a version nobody else runs cannot point to one server. Until three servers have reported, nothing but the count is shown at all.

A server counts as active while it has reported in the last 30 days. Its latest report replaces its last one, and a server that reports more than once an hour is turned away.

Turning it off

Reporting is on unless a server’s owner turns it off, which they can do at any time in any of three places:

  • In the admin area, under Settings, by turning off “Share anonymous usage statistics”.
  • In the access step of the setup wizard, before the server has sent anything.
  • By starting the server with VALENCE_TELEMETRY=off or DO_NOT_TRACK=1, which overrides the setting.

A server that stops reporting drops out of the figures after 30 days, and is forgotten altogether after a year.

Exactly what is sent, field by fieldThe code for this site