Ist there a statistic how often a plugin is active

As far as I am aware, this info isn’t available.

I think this should be done. Is there a way to request enhancements of the website itself?

It would also be a way to cleanup the directory. If a plugin is not used for 6 months or so it maybe is not used anymore ;).
So it might be deactivated and the author gets a message about it. So he can decide to enable the plugin for another 6 months…

If a plugin is not used for 6 months or so it maybe is not used anymore ;).

Not sure if that will ever get implemented. Not with a 6 month lead time anyway. As far as I am aware, the Repo monitors installed plugins – not active ones. And that’s purely so WP can display upgrade messages.

At 2 years, it stops showing up in searches, but as long as it’s here, it will always be scanned.

How are you determining that only 10 people are using it, though?

WordPress knows who has installed which version and also if you can update your plugin. So the information should be available to do something like this.

I simply want to provide a cool plugin. But if no one is actually using it I can do better stuff with my time ;).

As I said, WordPress only picks up on installed plugins – not active plugins. So there is literally no way to know how many people have downloaded a given plugin and then gone on to use/activate it.

o.k. Then even installed plugins would be a good way to go. So if a plugin is not installed anymore for a certain period of time it could be a candidate to mark for removal.

Why? Someone might still have a use for it.

I could live with this. But for me as developer I would like to know how often my plugin is actually installed.
This information does not even have to be public but for the developer itself it would be a number I would like to know!

Speaking as the secondary developer of a major ecommerce plugin and the primary developer of a couple of minor plugins, I don’t feel that this is important. If your plugin is getting a reasonable number of downloads, it proves that there’s a demand for a plugin of this type. If it’s totally borked & unusable, you’ll get to hear about in its support forum – trust me on this. Otherwise, a reasonable number of downloads indicates that people find it useful – potentially, temporarily or permanently. All seems fine and dandy, from my pov. ??

You for sure have then more experience here.

I have only a few hundred dl a day for my plugin. For me it would be helpful to know a kind of “conversion rate”.
If I e.g. add a new feature and more users are not only downloading it but also installing/keeping it installed.
Because in my opinion you only get users with problems in the support forum but not the ones which are really happy with it which any problems.

I still think this number should be provided to the developers because votes and reviews are not really comparable if you say you have 50.000 dl an 10 votes only …

Are you monitoring version usage using the pie chart of the Stats page? A reasonable % using the last 1 or 2 versions of the plugin should give you a rough idea of what kind of core user base you might have. For example, we’re nearing half a million downloads but only a about 33% are using the last 3 versions (latest only released a few days ago). So our conservative “finger in the air” estimate is that we have about 100K users.

It’s not much but it does help.