Over the past week, Gina Häussge, the creator and maintainer of the popular OctoPrint service, has revealed two manipulations of her free and open-source service’s anonymous usage stats by project sponsor Obico (formerly The Spaghetti Detective) and an OctoEverywhere user (according to the plugin) to game its popular plugins list. Häussge says that, as a result, OctoPrint has dropped Obico as a sponsor and intends to invoice it and OctoEverywhere for her time unraveling the manipulation.

At least 53,000 usage instances had been created by VMs over the 30-day period before OctoPrint revealed the manipulation, Häussge says. The instances appear to have made up about 35% of reporting OctoPrint instances, based on a graph Häussge provided in her blog about the misuse that showed usage stats dropping from approximately 145,000 instances to about 90,000 after blocking the offending client IPs.

When approached with reports of the manipulation, OctoEverywhere says it conducted an investigation and “determined a community member was responsible for manipulating the OctoPrint stats.” It claims the party responsible wasn’t aware of the dramatic impact their 38,000 fake instances had and “promised never to do it again.” Obico, on the other hand, came clean that the manipulation was intentional.

“I created a script to manipulate the OctoPrint stats to boost the ranking of Obico for OctoPrint plugin, probably back in 2022, after having some suspicion that OE was doing that,” said Kenneth Jiang in an Obico blog apology directed to Häussge. “My sincere apologies again for such a stupid and selfish mistake.”

The manipulation resulted in a significant skewing of the popular plugins list, demonstrated in Häussge’s first blog article about the discovery where a “before and after” list was shown to demonstrate the impact.

“I’m just tired, disappointed and outright exhausted,” Häussge says. “I’m tired of having to deal with this kind of stuff, and I’m disappointed that some people in this community apparently think it’s okay to manipulate the stats of a project that’s fully open source and free to use for their own personal gain.”

As a result of the misuse, OctoPrint has changed the plugin leaderboard to display “a randomized list of the top 20 plugins”, has nixed public tracking of commercial plugins, and dropped Obico as a sponsor of the project. “I cannot in good conscience prominently advertise for a company that has been manipulating the stats of my project for their own personal gain and through that caused damage to the project and the community,” Häussge explained.

As a primarily community-supported project, the result of this kind of manipulation is a waste of development time and community funds directed to Häussge – something the project was in dire need of late last year. Should Obico and OctoEverywhere respect Häussge’s bill, the remuneration may go some way towards making amends, but the community will never get Häussge’s time back.

To get all the details of the incidents with Obico and OctoEverywhere, read Häussge’s articles on the OctoPrint blog. Or, donate to OctoPrint to support one of the 3D printing community’s long-standing open-source projects.

Read more about OctoPrint:

• 10 Good Reasons to Use OctoPrint
• OctoPrint for Multiple Printers: How to Get Started
• The Best OctoPrint Plug-ins