Different entry points so that people can get the survey for their
users. That is, if a list owner wants to join the survey, the owner can
register on your site and get an entry url for their site - I would put
this into a rotating footer if I decided to participate. Then the list
owner will be able to get the stats for people who followed the survey in
from their site and compare that to the overall averages.
My hope, of course, is to get some validation for my claim that Roger
Klorese's user's are weird...or to discover that mine are. :-)
I do not suggest that you ask people for their e-mail addresses. I suspect
that people will believe that you are trying to gather addresses to spam
them. Just allow people to fill out the thing as many times as they want
to, or, better yet, drop a cookie on them (only to tell that they have
filled the survey out once -- or maybe then you can offer them their
answers back to change). Allow them to fill it out once per cookie per
entry URL.
At 10:03 PM 2002-07-11 -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>I mentioned this a week or so ago as part of another thread. I've been
>thinking about it ever since, and I've decided to go ahead and try to pull
>together something to do this.
>
>The idea: try to get a real-world, statistically significant view of the
>"average" mailing list user. I plan on doing this by creating an online
>survey (maximum 25 questions), and asking list managers to post a pointer to
>it on their lists, and list users to ask the list manager to post the
>pointer (I'm going to explicitly tell users not to do it themselves; I
>expect to be ignored by some, of course)
>
>I'd like to get 10-25,000 users worth of data here. More would be even
>better. Front end PHP, back end MySQL. I plan on trying to limit it to one
>submission per email address (using MD5 hashes on the address -- your
>suggestion welcome for alternatives) so I can try to recognize that I've
>seen an e-mail address, but not actually store the address for privacy
>reasons. Failing that, I'll simply set it up so that multiple submissions
>overwrite each other (last in wins).
>
>Part of this is to try to figure out what users REAL preferences are on a
>large scale -- we've had endless fights over reply-to, over subject line
>flags, etc, etc. Let's see if we can figure it out once and for all.
>
>I also want to try to figure out how these preferences change based on
>various aspects of the users -- how do newer users differ from experienced
>ones? That sort of thing.
>
>Finally, I want to see if I can figure out where these users are heading --
>see if we can get hints of where this stuff will be in a year, or 3.
>
>What's this mean for list-managers? I'd like feedback on things you'd like
>to find out here. Obviously, I'd like you to post the finished survey to
>your lists, but for now, what I really want are ideas of what to ask, and as
>I start building the survey forms, to comment on and help improve them, so
>this stuff will be generally useful to all of us.
>
>I don't expect to have a draft of the survey for a few weeks, but please
>start sending suggestions of what should be on it now. It'll help me focus
>what ought to be on it. Right now, I see splitting this up into a few
>sections:
>
>1) about the user: how long on the net, platform, client, etc.
>
>2) functionality issues: html, MIME, reply-to, subject flags, etc.
>
>3) other tools: usenet, IM, etc.
>
>4) lists subscribed to (one reason I want to be very careful about privacy;
>I don't want people to avoid listing, um, sensitive or adult lists)
>
>Since I want to keep this pretty short (25 questions or so, to keep from
>intimidating users into giving up), I don't think we'll get everything we
>want. But feel free to suggest things,a nd we'll decide later what to make
>the priorities...
>
>Your thoughts on this more than encouraged...
>
>Chuq
>
>--
>Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
>chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/
>
>The Cliff's Notes Cliff's Notes on Hamlet:
> And they all died happily ever after
--
"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of
nature!"
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
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