Developing free and open source software can be a thankless experience. Most folks do it because it’s something they’re passionate about, with the only personal benefit being the knowledge that there are individuals out there who found your work useful enough to download and install. So imagine how you’d feel if it turns out somebody was playing around with the figures, and the steady growth in the number of installs you thought your software had turned out to be fake.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://hackaday.com/2024/06/29/long-term-octoprint-stat-manipulation-uncovered/