No longer track various browser plugins #18726

Can we stop tracking of Flash, Java, Windowsmedia, Silverlight, Realplayer and Quicktime?

These aren't really used anymore. Putting this for now into Matomo 5.0 so we don't forget discussing this when we get to it.

I believe in Matomo 4.0 or 3.0 we already stopped tracking some plugins (not 100% sure) if I remember correctly. Can't find the PRs right now.

Would we also remove the historical data from the log tables by removing these columns? I think that should be fine and we could still show the aggregated data in the reports.

Looking at row evolution most have these plugins have gone to 1%/0% over a year ago.

See also https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/pull/15627 and #15956

This could have a big impact on peoples databases and complicates the upgrade. Moving this to 6.0 where we can do it aligned to other database upgrades.

@jane-twizel We could actually already stop tracking some of the plugins and removing them from the reports maybe.
This does not necessarily need a database update. If we decide to remove the columns from the log tables, this might impact historical data when past data is re-archived.

Btw. there will already be a database upgrade for 5 if we include https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/pull/17466

👍 I'll check with @mattab on Monday if we need to have #17466 included

We'll merge https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/pull/17466 as part of Matomo 6 as well instead of Matomo 5 unless there were any other required log schema changes (except for the index). This way the Matomo 4 -> 5 upgrade won't have any major schema changes except for 1 index on a log table.