If you don’t have fireinfo enabled, then the fireinfo.cgi page shows a message: “It is very important for the development of IPFire that you enable this service. Read more about the reasons.” with a link that goes to https://fireinfo.ipfire.org/ . But the page at the other end of that link doesn’t have any information about why you should enable fireinfo.
Yes, there is no explicit reason given. But if you click to show a random profile, you can see what informations are contained. These may be interesting in answering issue reports.
Further fireinfo is the database for decisions about severness of issues ( for a great part of the systems / only some systems ). This helps core developpers to steer the dev process.
The more stats the devs have on the hardware used and features used by IPFire boxes out in the wild, the better they can focus on the most used hardware and features.
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Hi,
first, welcome to the IPFire community. 
Second, the data sent to the Fireinfo service are primarily hardware-related. For example, we are currently slowly phasing out 32-bit installations for various reasons. By looking at the CPU features, we are able to measure how many people’s hardware would support running a 64-bit operating system (those would have to re-install their IPFire machines sooner or later), which gives us a more precise view than the amount of installations running on a 64-bit version of IPFire.
The location statistic is interesting as well - in case more IPFire installations would pop up in countries where neither German nor English is a native language, we might need to ensure the translation of the corresponding language is correct and up-to-date.
Looking at the release statistic, the brutal truth is that about half of all IPFire installations reporting back to Fireinfo are heavily (> 3 Core Updates) outdated. Apparently, most people let their firewalls go to pot - which is a pity and IMHO contradicts the intention of such a firewall.
To keep it short: Please enable Fireinfo. The data you provide us do not contain personal information (we do not store any IP address, but resolved countries only), thus not posing a security or privacy threat.
Thanks, and best regards,
Peter Müller
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All good points, which should be on the fireinfo.ipfire.org page
Or perhaps the “Read more about the reasons…” link in the IPFire web front end could point to a page on the wiki with that info.
Re the outdated releases, I totally resemble that remark. I probably don’t log on to the admin pages more than once every 3 months, and when I do I usually find it’s more than one version out of date.
An automatic update option would be a very useful thing - perhaps with an option to specify an “out of hours” time window when it could reboot.
Apparently, it might be an option that the big number of issue started few releases ago with unbound, DNS an so on are telling the people “maybe an update is not the greatest idea” if they are looking for a zero-issue update.
In any case, i would activate FireInfo for every new installation but… I stated few months ago that due to a lot if issues backed up by users into this community, currently IPFire is not into my top 5 list for firewall solutions currently.
Don’t get me wrong: i think that IPFIre is still a valuable and interesting option, but there’s in high risk to not consider viable the startup of a new installation.