Better (more fine-grained) download statistics (online view)

[rubyFeedback]

Say that you create a new .gem.

You upload it (to rubygems.org).

You have an initial download size of 100 for that gem, just as a number, in the first
day. So 100 people/bots downloaded it.

Ok.

After 3 weeks (it's not a very important gem and you work only casually on
it) you look again.

You are now at 300 downloads.

But how is this distributed? It could be at day #2 being +200 more downloads.
Or the +200 downloads in 3 weeks evenly distributed.

I would thus like to propose to give a little bit more information about the
"download demographics" of a gem.

I am not asking for live data, mind you!

Having this on a stored-per-day may be simplest. Like you store it only
once per day for all gems, say run a script 5 minutes before 24:00 o'clock
or something like that. Or, if that is too much, perhaps every 2 or 3 days or
just weekly. Anyway, this is a detail - more important to describe what can be
seen there.

In my mind this could be a BIT similar to google statistics you see on youtube
e. g. to see how many people watched the full video and what not. If you
remember this, they show you some graph, and this graph looks quite nice.

The described functionality is already available on "bestgems.org", so perhaps
the code could be re-used as-is (I think the licence allows for this yes? MIT if
I recall correctly).

You can of course say "but bestgems.org has this functionality already". Well,
not everyone goes to bestgems.org. I often work on rubygems.org only,
and look at things there, so I think it would be better to have that functionality
available.

The above is just a rough suggestion. Of course you could add more
javascript and display things dynamically, but for this proposal I am more
interested in proposing the BASE functionality. Aka to see whether this
feature is good/bad, and if good, then one could focus on the simplest
solution possible. At a later time this could be extended. That way rubygems.org
also see how useful this extra information may be.

(Suggesting to make this weekly also has been done because some time
ago Microsoft via github said that it wants to remove the "trend" part,
and many people on reddit did not like it because trends give them some
information. Google trends are available, so github losing that functionality
would kind of push people to visit other sites for that information; Github
said that one reason for wanting to remove it is because of too much
traffic/data stored, so perhaps weekly storage may suffice for rubygems.org
aka: "The gem xyz has been downloaded 385 times in the last week.",
or in week number #33, and saying which calendar/days are meant with
this number etc...)

I hope I was able to explain the functionality. Thank you for reading.

Edit: Ah I forgot the rationale actually.

Being able to view the download "trend" may help people distinguish
between bot downloads and humans. In the first phase of an uploaded
gems, I think bots/scripts are the primary ones downloading this. Only
at a later time do more people download this (I know because I got
email from real people, often pointing at problems, bugs or improving
documentation or other suggestions, but I do not think that people
insta-download after a gem was published so I assume most of the
early downloads come from bots/scripts syncing stuff and what
not.)