An idea I thought that would help refine gameplay would be to retrieve a list of commands online players have input, or possibly just those ones that werent recognized.

After watching a few friends run through my game I can see what they attempt that I didnt think of, and where they get stuck. In this way I can try to account for it and hopefully make the gaming experience more smooth and enjoyable for everyone. This is a very small sample of the population though. If the webplayer retained a list of commands entered either for a single play-through, or a cumulative list the authors could use the data to improve their game. Is this possible?

It's a technique used by other IF authors. Some games in testing record the player's input and then the transcript is emailed to the author so they can go over it and see where people had trouble, etc.

I don't think it would be difficult for Alex to implement, as long as the transcripts were stored server-side and then emailed out, or were browsable online and could be used as walkthroughs.