[4] Dont show stats exceptions/failures/warnings to users

[PhilETaylor]

Pull Request for Closes #32005 #33083 #32129 et al.

Summary of Changes

Sometimes "something" stops a successful submission of anonymised stats to the Joomla stats collection endpoint.

Most of the time there is nothing anyone needs to do.

Joomla Stats collection is a vanity "nice to have" and the Joomla project should not be complaining if users fail to submit their stats

The stats process should die gracefully and quietly - unless in debug mode.

Notices, and Exceptions should not be thrown into the users face if the Joomla Stats collection server endpoint is down, unreliable, unavailable, uncountable.

Testing Instructions

Install Joomla 4

Change the url in the file to be a fake non-routable url

protected $serverUrl = 'https://dev.null/stats/submit';

To reset your stats plugin to "out of the box" run sql after s/jos/prefix:

UPDATE `jos_extensions` SET `params` = '' WHERE `name` = 'plg_system_stats';

Test with "always"

Actual result BEFORE applying this Pull Request

Red exception shown to the screen on failed submission of stats

Expected result AFTER applying this Pull Request

No red exception messages
If debug is on - red exception message
if logging is enabled - entries in the log like:

2021-04-15T20:05:35+00:00	WARNING 172.20.0.1	jerror	Could not connect to statistics server: Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1 port 80: Connection refused
2021-04-15T20:05:48+00:00	WARNING 172.20.0.1	jerror	Could not connect to statistics server: Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1 port 80: Connection refused
2021-04-15T20:06:01+00:00	WARNING 172.20.0.1	jerror	Could not connect to statistics server: Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1 port 80: Connection refused

Documentation Changes Required

none

[ceford]

With the patch applied, if debug is on there is no red exception message but logging continues. That is not what it says in the instructions and I think it would be best to have the message, even tailored to give a bit more explanation.

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[ceford]

I have tested this item ✅ successfully on d7da0f7

I am happy with what this pr does. I was thinking a log may be full of useless lines like this:
2021-05-08T12:41:06+00:00 ERROR 127.0.0.1 - Could not connect to statistics server: Could not resolve host: dev.null
But that is a separate issue. If users are logging they need to set up the logger properly. I never really learned how to do that myself.

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[alikon]

the stats need more care fore sure
joomla/statistics-server#60

[alikon]

I have tested this item ✅ successfully on d7da0f7

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[richard67]

Thanks!

[wilsonge]

This is simply a vanity tool of the Joomla project (the stats are meaningless anyway as they only show the first version installed, and not the "current" version at all times, so the stats are always incorrect when aggregated and displayed on joomla.org)

It does give the updated data to the project. And as production we used these extensively when trying to figure out minimum requirements for J4 (we filtered out any data not submitted in the last 3 months unlike the data that shows in the graph on j.org)

Although to be clear it’s correct to not show most the warnings to end users (we should probably log them however)

[brianteeman]

it's still fundamentally flawed as no site that said no 5 years ago has ever submitted data again. Perhaps it should be considered to ask everyone again at each update