Fair enough - it's a million miles away from being the biggest headache I have, but there have been instances lately where both of those things might well have helped me understand why a customer's license was behaving the way it was. Just gently pointing it out so that if it's ever considered again, you can't say “nobody has ever asked for this” :)
Icons for offline activation?Answered
I guess this might be impossible if you haven't got this information stored against each activation, but… It would on occasion be useful to us to be able to see whether a particular customer activation was done online or offline, maybe with an icon overlay like you do with VMs.
Alternatively, is it possible to detect offline activation in code and display it on an About screen or similar?
There are also occasions where it would be useful to be able to see the date the activation last validated on your servers. We've got software out there that doesn't set TA_SKIP_OFFLINE to True, and yet it seems to last far longer on some offline activations than the recheck period plus the grace period! I'm curious as to whether maybe the computers are being taken home and “converting” to online activations when away from the corporate firewall.
Answer
Hey Richard,
We don't have any plans to add “visibility” to whether an activation was online or offline. Mostly, because there's very little actionable information there. All the actionable information is built-in to the algorithms, and how the example code is written (namely, to check every X days with Y grace days, and to optionally “skip this” with offline activations).
If you're updating license fields often then the customer should online activate.
There are also occasions where it would be useful to be able to see the date the activation last validated on your servers.
We've considered it, but we've always decided against it. It's another case where it doesn't provide actionable information. We only update the date if the activation data changes, but not if re-verification is successful with the same activation data.