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[KtosoX]

Maybe it's just me, but those questions about sexual orientation are a bit weird. Who cares how much heterosexual feel/think you are ?

...

That question also struck me as odd. I left that field blank.

[Orange Wizard]

The whole gender/sexual identity thing has been floating around the lower boards for a while, getting a lot of people banned and/or royally pissed off.
So yeah, I'm not surprised it's a question.

[Dunamisdeos]

... may I ask which required questions you thought were weird as hell? Because really, I don't see any weird as hell required questions... and nobody tells me what they answered as a joke -.-

Some were pretty personal. Of course no one is going to feel the same way about all of these, but for instance I don't really feel the need to discuss my "mental disorders" or my job salary with people on the internet. The simple existence of these questions didn't offend me, but some of them just seem completely unnecessary for the purposes of profiling a forum.

Anyway, I put my salary as 9.99 a month, and gave mental disorders as active telepathy mixed with attention deficit.

[Cruxador]

Anyway, I hope the results will be interesting, especially about the age and countries.

It's not about "who cares"--it's more about simply profiling Bay12. I don't know about the upper boards, but there's a feeling that there are an atypically large number of sexual minorities in the lower boards. A survey can help show if that feel is right. You're perfectly within your rights to leave that and the internet speed question blank.

Then I guess the real question is... Who cares about the lower boards?

More seriously, it needs to be a statistic that somebody cares about. You didn't include a "profile" to get an idea of how much we all like spaghetti, did you? Because nobody really cares. User sexuality isn't related to Dwarf Fortress at all, so why should it be in a DF survey? And if it's not really a DF survey, but just "lower board community survey" then why is it getting posted on the boards that are actually about Dwarf Fortress?

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

More seriously, it needs to be a statistic that somebody cares about. You didn't include a "profile" to get an idea of how much we all like spaghetti, did you? Because nobody really cares. User sexuality isn't related to Dwarf Fortress at all, so why should it be in a DF survey? And if it's not really a DF survey, but just "lower board community survey" then why is it getting posted on the boards that are actually about Dwarf Fortress?

Because it is neither a Dwarf Fortress survey or a Lower Boards survey.  It's a Bay 12 survey that was brought up to the DF boards so that it can get statistics on all members of the Bay 12 community, as when it is only 'hosted' on the lower boards, it misses out on people who only visit the upper boards of the forum.

[KtosoX]

Could someone please elaborate on this "lower boards" and "upper boards" concepts? I'm assuming the first term describes an active group of users from a part of the Bay 12 Games Forum which is not connected to DF?

[Dunamisdeos]

Anyway, I hope the results will be interesting, especially about the age and countries.

It's not about "who cares"--it's more about simply profiling Bay12. I don't know about the upper boards, but there's a feeling that there are an atypically large number of sexual minorities in the lower boards. A survey can help show if that feel is right. You're perfectly within your rights to leave that and the internet speed question blank.

Then I guess the real question is... Who cares about the lower boards?

More seriously, it needs to be a statistic that somebody cares about. You didn't include a "profile" to get an idea of how much we all like spaghetti, did you? Because nobody really cares. User sexuality isn't related to Dwarf Fortress at all, so why should it be in a DF survey? And if it's not really a DF survey, but just "lower board community survey" then why is it getting posted on the boards that are actually about Dwarf Fortress?

This accurately sums up my feelings. +1

[Eldin00]

Could someone please elaborate on this "lower boards" and "upper boards" concepts? I'm assuming the first term describes an active group of users from a part of the Bay 12 Games Forum which is not connected to DF?

The terms refer to specific groups of forums from among the entire set of Bay 12 forums, and the naming comes from the organization of the main forums page, with the 'upper' boards being the ones at the top (which happen to mostly be the ones dealing specifically with dwarf fortress), and the 'lower' boards being the ones nearer the bottom of the page (which have nothing at all to do with Dwarf Fortress).

[Orange Wizard]

Simply put, people care about the lower boards because that's where the vast majority of the forum's traffic comes from. We even have people who have come to Bay12 solely for the forum games section.
The survey is being moved to different boards to get a wider audience, primarily because there's a number of people in the lower boards (again, majority of traffic and all that) who find this stuff interesting. It doesn't matter if you're not interested, but there's no reason to bash the people who do.

Also, next year's survey will have a question about how much you like spaghetti in it, just to spite you.

...

Could someone please elaborate on this "lower boards" and "upper boards" concepts? I'm assuming the first term describes an active group of users from a part of the Bay 12 Games Forum which is not connected to DF?

On the forum's main page, there are three sections (well, and Announcements, but don't worry about that). We have the upper DF boards, the middle boards Curses, Other Games, and so on, and the lower boards General Discussion, Life Advice, and FG&RP.
"Lower boarder" and "upper boarder" refer to people who post on the lower boards and upper boards, oddly enough. I've never seen the term "middle boarder" used, possibly because there's a negligible number of people who only ever post in the middle boards.

[Button]

Upper boarder here, gonna stick up for the sexual orientation & salary questions. These are common demographic survey questions, just phrased slightly differently from how they usually are.

Salary survey questions usually give salary ranges rather than asking you to specify your salary. I suspect if the question had included range options (with a "prefer not to answer" option) rather than asking you to specify, you wouldn't have blinked. The demographic information that salary information gives is a rough picture of the class distribution of the community in question.

Sexuality questions usually give options for hetero/homo/bi, and I suspect no one would have blinked if it had been phrased that way either. The Kinsey scale just gives slightly more nuanced answers, for people who are interested.

As for sexuality's relevance to Dwarf Fortress, I think it's relevant in more ways than we hetero folks tend to think. As an obvious example, I doubt that anyone not-heterosexual had a negative reaction to the sexual orientation Easter Egg in the latest release.

[Dunamisdeos]

This is a survey regarding the population of a video game forum.

It asked for my exact salary, religion, sexual orientation, and specific medical history. In fact, if I recall, 3 questions on the entire thing were related to the forum or game in question.

It does seem like a survey geared specifically at the lower boards.

[Skyrunner]

... may I ask which required questions you thought were weird as hell? Because really, I don't see any weird as hell required questions... and nobody tells me what they answered as a joke -.-

Some were pretty personal. Of course no one is going to feel the same way about all of these, but for instance I don't really feel the need to discuss my "mental disorders" or my job salary with people on the internet. The simple existence of these questions didn't offend me, but some of them just seem completely unnecessary for the purposes of profiling a forum.

Anyway, I put my salary as 9.99 a month, and gave mental disorders as active telepathy mixed with attention deficit.

My only question is why can't you leave those fields blank??? I looked at the results and some people answered -1, 0, or 1 for height, weight and internet speed. This is really annoying because those feels are optional for a reason. I don't understand why people can't just skip questions they feel are too personal. Instead they have to answer jokingly, making my job harder. I especially hate those who answered, jokingly, 1 for internet speed, because I can't really tell if they really do have 1 Mbps interner speed (like some of my friends do) or if it's a joke answer. At least height and weight I can immediately tell that 1, 0, -1 are invalid answers.

in short: leave questions you don't want to answer BLANK instead of filling in bogus information. Thanks?

[smithist]

It's a survey, the point is typically to get some idea about a given demographic: who are they? The questions seemed normal to me, in that they were pretty similar to basically every other survey I've ever taken, soo. It's also voluntary.

I didn't even blink at the mental health question because, well, let's be real: it's a survey for people who voluntarily play DF.

[mardouille]

More seriously, it needs to be a statistic that somebody cares about. You didn't include a "profile" to get an idea of how much we all like spaghetti, did you? Because nobody really cares. User sexuality isn't related to Dwarf Fortress at all, so why should it be in a DF survey? And if it's not really a DF survey, but just "lower board community survey" then why is it getting posted on the boards that are actually about Dwarf Fortress?

Because it is neither a Dwarf Fortress survey or a Lower Boards survey.  It's a Bay 12 survey that was brought up to the DF boards so that it can get statistics on all members of the Bay 12 community, as when it is only 'hosted' on the lower boards, it misses out on people who only visit the upper boards of the forum.

I did not know the lower forums were actually popular, I've never been there.

Now that I think about it, no questions about marital status or number of children. Aren't they more important questions about demographics than internet speed?

Anyway, sorry if my post was bashing a bit, I was annoyed about some of the questions. I'm totally fine with the salary question, even though it's taboo pretty much in all cultures

[Greiger]

I don't have any problems with any of the questions.  Bay12 has an unusually vocal bi and homosexual community (primarily in the lower boards if I understand).  So it's obvious they exist, a more granular question makes sense here. 

While I don't know how common it is, I've seen some somewhat joking questions in actual large scale surveys as well.  Usually in the middle of longer surveys, probably to keep people interested instead of getting halfway through and getting bored and deciding to stop taking it.  Depending on what the question is it may actually lead to a result worth investigating further even if the joke question itself isn't useable.  For example the toady one question may lead to a more serious question next time about the community's opinion of Toady One depending on how the answers lay out.

As for the salary question, it does seem a little unusual and ranges may have served better.  But as far as I can tell the only thing that gets revealed as identifying information is your IP address.  Which only Toady One or ThreeToe can actually use to link to forum members, and even if you are worried about that there are plenty of ways to temporarily change your IP address.  In many cases you can do it permanently.  I see no security concerns by giving your salary.   Probably every job application you ever filled out asks you that, and they have a lot more information that goes with it that CAN do some harm.