Drop in downloads chart

[ErikBjare]

There was a drop in the downloads chart recently, might have happened around the time that i experimented with pre/draft-releases, not sure. Worth investigating.

@TimeToBuildBob Investigate and fix

[TimeToBuildBob]

Investigation findings

Root cause: The download rate genuinely dropped ~80% from 2026-03-14 to 2026-03-25 (~200–300/day vs the normal ~1000–1200/day), then recovered on March 26. This matches your timeline of experimenting with pre/draft-releases — if v0.13.2 was temporarily marked as a pre-release, the /releases/latest redirect would have pointed users to v0.13.1 instead, causing fewer downloads.

Current status: Downloads are back to normal. v0.13.2 is stable, and the recent rate is ~1100–1200/day. The dip in the chart is historically accurate — it reflects what actually happened.

Secondary bug (stats CI): collect_stats.py was also failing intermittently during March with KeyError: 'stargazers_count' — this happens when GitHub rate-limits the API and returns a {"message": "..."} response instead of the repo object. Failures confirmed on 2026-03-04, 2026-03-08, 2026-03-14, 2026-03-20. When the CI fails, no data is committed for that run (missing data points, filled by interpolation in the chart).

Fix: Submitted ActivityWatch/stats#8 — adds raise_for_status() and a proper key check to stars(), and guards the platform-regex in downloads() so assets with non-standard names don't crash the loop.

[0xbrayo]

@TimeToBuildBob do you have download stats for v0.13.2 when it was marked as a pre-release. If you do, can you use that to update the data?