Have Dashboard politely ask users occasionally if they'll share telemetry

[cliffoo]

Addresses: #4828

Use dashboard to prompt our users to graciously enable analytics.

Behavior on load:

flowchart TD
  A{"Has the user explicitly<br/>opted in/out before?<br />(via the config command,<br />or much less likely, editing<br />the user config manually)"} -->|no| B([Ask to enable analytics])
  A -->|yes| C{Is analytics enabled?}
  C -->|no| D{Has it been a year since<br/>user last said no?}
  C -->|yes| E([OK])
  D -->|no| E
  D -->|yes, ask again| B

Loading

How?

DashboardServer's express server has two new endpoints: POST and GET at /analytics. Their corresponding handlers read and write to the user config object, which in turn modifies the config file on disk. Frontend just interacts with /analytics and manages notifications as needed.

Wording

The prompt content (located at src/utils/notifications/analytics.tsx) mostly follows that of the previous PR (#5290).

Testing instructions

0. Locate your Truffle user config file (likely at ~/.config/truffle-nodejs/config.json)
1. Inside this user config file, remove enableAnalytics, analyticsSet, analyticsMessageDateTime for a clean slate, maybe uniqueId also. Continue if these fields are not present.
2. Start and open dashboard. You will be prompted to enable analytics, click Enable.
3. Verify that the config file is updated with analytics enabled. Repeat step 1 for clean slate.
4. Refresh dashboard. This time when you're prompted click Dismiss.
5. Verify that the config file is updated with analytics disabled. Edit analyticsMessageDateTime to 1 (no quotes!).
6. Refresh dashboard. You will be prompted to enable analytics, but with slightly different text.

Related:

• Our analytics policy
• Our analytics code

[gnidan]

This looks good. Happy to approve tomorrow; just want to give others a chance to take a look first.

Thanks @cliffoo!

[gnidan]

Note that this kind of math is rife with edge cases around leap years and whatnot. Better if we can do a proper duration check vs. millisecond arithmetic and assuming we know how many milliseconds a year is.

Happy to accept an issue for this instead of fixing it now.

[gnidan]

(OK, if this triggers a day early, it doesn't really matter. But still... good practice not to assume you can just subtract dates like that)

[cds-amal]

https://date-fns.org/ may be a viable option

[cds-amal]

Happy to accept an issue for this instead of fixing it now.

+1

[cliffoo]

Good point! I've changed this to compare Date objects instead. The logic is as follows:

const askAfter = new Date(lastAskedInMs);
askAfter.setDate(askAfter.getDate() + 365);

if (new Date() > askAfter) // Ask again!

Note that this is affected by leap years. We can fix it by using the pair setFullYear and getFullYear instead of setDate and getDate, but I figured days are easier to work with if we later want to change this threshold to some other number of days.

[gnidan]

If we wanted to be super accurate, the way to do this would be to do, like, add(date, thresholdDuration), where thresholdDuration = { years: 1 }, then check against that.

But it's okay. If you say "no" on 2023-12-01 and we ask again on 2024-11-30... kinda trivial.

[gnidan]

So for this sorta thing, I'll also note that, in situations like this, you might consider getting into the habit of making separate operations for enable vs. disable. It feels a bit more hygienic: enableAnalytics() and disableAnalytics() are more clear and succinct compared to updateAnalyticsConfig(true) and updateAnalyticsConfig(false).

(There are downsides here, of course, like having to pass an extra function around in the context here, but my personal stance is that it's worth it to have operations align with specific user actions)

[fainashalts]

LGTM! I think the language is very polite and clear! I agree with @gnidan on separating enableAnalytics() and disableAnalytics() but that can be done as follow-on work if desired. :)

[eggplantzzz]

Just curious, what is this id used for?

[cliffoo]

Ah this is so that an id can be assigned to a specific notification, so we can reference that notification later and make changes to it.

Here the notification with id "analytics" is updated to show hey thanks for enabling telemetry when user clicks enable, and hidden when user click no.

[eggplantzzz]

i like it