Input request for the recent searches feature of SymPy Live

[Aaron Meurer]

I know a lot of people here don't follow the issue tracker, so I'm
posting this here too, as I'd like some community input. Feel free to
respond either here or on the issue tracker. The relevant issue is
http://code.google.com/p/sympy/issues/detail?id=3359.

The basic issue is that the "recent searches" feature of SymPy Live is
not being used. I know this because all but two of the top searches
are from me. The reason for this is that it is disabled by default.

For those of you who don't know, if enabled, the recent searches box
at live.sympy.org shows the ten most recent searches of everyone,
globally.

Here are the basic issues:

- The option to enable this feature is called just "Privacy". It
doesn't explain what it does, so I think that even people who look
through the settings and wouldn't mind this setting don't enable it
because they don't know what it means and it sounds bad. So we need
to come up with some text that explains what the feature is.

- The name "recent searches" isn't very accurate, as the inputs are
not really searches. This is a minor issue, though. What is a more
accurate name than "searches"?

- The real issue here, though, is that even if we fix the names, I
still don't think many people would use the feature, simply because
most people don't even look at settings, much less change the
defaults. So the question is, should we enable this by default? I
think at the very least we should enable executions from the Sphinx
extension, since there is really not privacy issue there.

Aaron Meurer

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am 12.08.2012 07:01, schrieb Aaron Meurer:
> - The real issue here, though, is that even if we fix the names, I
> still don't think many people would use the feature, simply because
> most people don't even look at settings, much less change the
> defaults. So the question is, should we enable this by default? I
> think at the very least we should enable executions from the Sphinx
> extension, since there is really not privacy issue there.

If it's not a privacy issue, then it should be public.
Anonymized (no names attached), of course.

If somebody is working on something super-secret (and there are
legitimate reasons for that), they can always install a local SymPy.

However, SymPy Live should advertise that there's a search function, for
everybody to see, so people can make an informed decision.

[Ondřej Čertík]

I would enable it by default. People who really don't want this can
always disable
it by clicking on the check box. The check box can be called "public
history" for example
and it will be on by default.

Ondrej