ClawHub telemetry

Registry telemetry is usually described in the vaguest possible terms, which is why people turn it off on principle. ClawHub's is specific enough to reason about, and reading it carefully tells you something useful about the install numbers you see on every listing.

When anything is sent at all

• You have to be logged in. If you are not signed in to the CLI, nothing is reported at all, which makes anonymous use genuinely silent rather than quietly counted.
• It fires on a completed install, on an update that replaces a catalogue skill, or on an authenticated plugin install through the ClawHub source.
• Telemetry must not be disabled, and disabling it is documented rather than buried.
• The event is sent after the install has finished and its local record has been written, as one best-effort call, so a failed report never blocks the install.

Install events record presence, not a snapshot of your installed skills.

What it will not collect

Four exclusions are stated outright, and they are the ones that matter. No local filesystem paths, and no identifiers derived from local folder names. No file contents. No per-run logs, prompts or other CLI output. The one path-shaped field that does travel is a repository-relative source path, which locates the skill inside its own public source repository rather than on your disk.

What the event carries

• The installed skill slug or the canonical plugin package name, and the version when it is known.
• For skills, optionally the publisher handle, the source reference and kind, the repository and the repository-relative path, the source URL and canonical reference.
• Also, when available, the scan status and trust label, which is how the registry can relate install volume to audit state rather than counting blindly.

Two counters are maintained for skills. One counts unique users who have ever reported an install; the other counts unique users who have reported one and have not since deleted their telemetry. The difference between them is the only lever a user has over the published number. See How ClawHub works for what the listing does with it and The ClawHub CLI for where the event is emitted.

Why the number only climbs

Because an event records presence rather than state, uninstalling sends nothing and decrements nothing, and the sync command does not reconcile removals either. Even a legacy snapshot report only adds what it names; a skill left out of the list is not removed from the count. Install counts are therefore a measure of how many people ever tried something, not of how many still run it, and the honest way to read a big number is as cumulative interest. See Reading a ClawHub security audit for the signals worth weighing alongside it and ClawHub moderation and account standing for what else can move a listing.

On Diali

Diali hosts OpenClaw, so the CLI telemetry described here is generated by an assistant acting for you rather than by your own machine. Each customer runs their own assistant, the runtime configuration is generated from the dashboard and replaced at each release, and state lives on a persistent volume, with daily snapshots and one-click restore available through the Backups add-on (included on Max). See Hosted OpenClaw on Diali for what the hosting includes and Diali pricing for what it costs.

• Not signed in means not reported.
• No paths, no file contents, no prompts, no logs.
• An install count is cumulative interest, not current usage.