Hey!
Seems like the Downloads statistics are not refreshing for me. My ‘Total Downloads’ has been stuck on the same number for a few weeks now I think (or at least 1 week). The downloads graph, though, is updating and showing around 10-20 downloads per day which are not added to the total number below the graph.
Anything I can do to fix the issue myself or shall I just wait for an update that would fix it?
Hi @mephiles! We’ve been revamping how add-on statistics and downloads are calculated (see blog post). As part of this work, we’re getting rid of the “total downloads” stat because it doesn’t reflect recent activity; we’re going to replace it with “weekly downloads.” People who want to keep track of the total downloads number can add up their weekly counts. You found this right as we were about to announce the change, which is expected to go live this week during our regularly scheduled update. 
No offense but removing the “Total Downloads” because ‘it doesn’t reflect recent activity’ seems like a stupid reason.
I understand that some people might like more stats about recent activity but there are people who also like to see the “Total Downloads”. By removing it completely you just take away a feature that will not hurt anybody by existing or did it have some bad side-effects?
“People who want to keep track of total downloads number can add up their weekly counts.” So if I want to find out the Total Downloads, I have to go through all weekly numbers for the last 2 years (and growing)? Seems like a step back in QOL??
I find the removal of this stat a bad idea as I don’t see how this would hurt anyone by being shown.
Keeping track of this number means running regular cron jobs to compute it for all (tens of thousands of) add-ons in the DB. It’s a maintenance burden and a minor cost. Without a doubt it’s an inconvenience to get rid of it, but if it’s really important for you to keep track of it, it’s still possible (but the burden falls on you).
Why would you have to run “regular corn jobs”?
I am able to go to my statistics, choose a “custom” time for Downloads. I can set the starting point as “1st of January, 2017”, for example, which is way before I actually started (January, 2019). This will show my Total Downloads number.
Can’t you just get the history and compute the values right away when a user visits the statistics page? Or keep track of the totals and bring them up-to-date only when a user visits the statistics page? If using “custom” works then I see no harm in “automating” it?
I’m not one of the engineers working on AMO, so I can’t speak for them about all the trade-offs involved. However, here are a couple of things to take into account: (1) having specialized code in the statistics page that adds up a bunch of historical data only for a small number of devs who might like to see the total downloads number is probably not a good time investment, and (2) for this to work we would need to keep the historical download data from before this switch we’re making, and we don’t plan to do that. Also, it would be very inconsistent since the way downloads are counted before and after the switch is fairly different.