Add "Recent Downloads" Metric to community plugins

Feature requests
1

Display downloads from the last 30, 60, or 90 days alongside cumulative totals.

The Problem It Solves

Currently, the download count only ever goes up - it’s the sum of every download across every version ever released. This creates several issues:

  • Old but abandoned plugins look popular - A plugin with 5,000 total downloads might only have 50 in the last 90 days, indicating it’s no longer actively used

  • New but growing plugins are buried - A 3-month-old plugin with 1,000 downloads (all recent) appears less popular than a 3-year-old plugin with 2,000 downloads (mostly from 2022)

  • You can’t see maintenance impact - When a developer ships improvements, there’s no way to see if users are responding positively

  • Discovery prioritises history over current value - Sorting by total downloads favours old plugins regardless of current relevance

How Recent Downloads Helps

A time-windowed metric (e.g., “last 90 days”) provides:

  1. Current popularity signal - Shows what’s actively being downloaded right now

  2. Maintenance health indicator - Plugins with steady recent downloads are actively maintained and trusted

  3. Growth visibility - Developers can see if their updates are gaining traction

  4. Better discovery - Users can find plugins that are currently popular, not just historically popular

Example Display

Plugin Name
├─ Total downloads: 4,113
├─ Last 90 days: 892
└─ Updated: 3 days ago

Or with visual indicators:

Plugin Name
4,113 downloads | 892 recent (90d) ↑

Implementation Notes

This should be calculable from existing data in community-plugin-stats.json since it already tracks:

  • Per-version download counts

  • Update timestamps (can derive when versions were released)

The calculation would be: sum all per-version downloads for versions released within the last X days, plus continued downloads of older versions during that window.

Why 90 Days Specifically?

  • Long enough to smooth out weekly/monthly variance

  • Short enough to show current trends (a quarter is a meaningful business timeframe)

  • Accounts for slow updaters - Users who check for updates monthly are still captured

Other options: 30 days (more volatile but shows very current activity) or 60 days (middle ground).

1 Like
2

…if the plugin is still updating. If it’s not, the other 4.950 could still be happily using it.

Also in practice, if a highly downloaded plugin has problems, users will be motivated to find alternatives. If alternatives exist, they can overtake the other’s numbers (tho it’s not guaranteed). When Folder Note became unmaintained and buggy, AidenLX’s Folder Note came along and gained users (I don’t recall if it surpassed the number of downloads and can’t check because it’s no longer available). So people still dowloaded Folder Note, but the community directed people to AidenLX’s. AidenLX’s didn’t update for a while and Folder Notes came along. Folder Notes now has far more downloads than Folder Note.

3

Also have to add that some plugins like breadcrumbs stopped receiving updates to the stable version, but the beta version has been in the works for a long time with somewhat regular updates. (It show as recently updated in the community plugins interface)

Something to consider

1 Like