Survey results.... come and get 'em stat-fans...

DeVore

Here's the results of the survey. As you can see we have aggregated them to avoid any personal data being identified....

Some interesting info in there and a whopping 3500 people responded which gives us a rock solid base on which to extrapolate.

DeV.

Gone West

Haven't been around a whole lot lately, but what is this survey for?

Also, not one person replied more than 7 family members in your household out of 3500 people surveyed? I could have changed that if I'd spotted the survey

Smellyirishman

Cool.

But how come 83% of the users are male,
Yet only 38% use it for "adult" means. (Am I getting that stat right, that is what it represents right?)

Something is wrong.

simu

Geez, where are all the women? I had the impression the ratio had gotten more even of late!

DeVore

This is a self selected survey so you need to consider that potentially more men are likely to submit surveys then women. Then again, that could be reversed. It DOES however, correlate to our own census under the SYS dropdown.

DeV.

Stargal

simu wrote:

Geez, where are all the women? I had the impression the ratio had gotten more even of late!

Yeah I never realised we were such a minority!

The figures for the 'This Site Downloads Fast' question were funny, being almost completely spread out over every answer:

Completely disagree 17.51%
Disagree 17.16%
Less or more disagree 16.40%
Neutral 15.99%
Less or more agree 14.03%
Agree 12.39%
Completely agree 6.52%

seamus

It's a slight increase on the census two years ago simu: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=249022

Some unexepcted stuff there for me. The bulk of the membership is 25-34? More people access boards from work or home than college (big shock for me).

Interesting stuff on internet usage for webmasters - primarily the amount of people who use the net for news and shopping. Was a good deal higher than I expected.

RuggieBear

so was there a prize draw or something for this survey or am i getting mixed up....~?

DeVore

Yeah, there was now that you mention it. Let me chase that up when I get a chance (off to Malta for a holiday for 5 days but I can chase it online).

DeV.

RuggieBear

DeVore wrote:

Yeah, there was now that you mention it. Let me chase that up when I get a chance (off to Malta for a holiday for 5 days but I can chase it online).

DeV.

Groovy:)

Zaph

Was it a random sampling or was everyone meant to get a chance to take part? Just curious because I never saw the questionnaire.

nesf

seamus wrote:

Some unexepcted stuff there for me. The bulk of the membership is 25-34? More people access boards from work or home than college (big shock for me).

Same, I thought that college students did still make up a fair percentage of users that said assuming that most people who accessed it in college continued to use it when working it would kind of make sense. That and broadband at home for students is actually (relatively) common now versus when I joined this site 5 years ago where even the people living at home were fairly unlikely to have broadband at home never mind those of us living away from home.

DeVore

Actually the student population has always been a minority here (albeit a large one). That didnt surprise me much... I havent sat down and had a really good look at the data. I'm also looking to get my hands on the base data to do some deeper analysis (how many students are on at 11pm-3am and likely to be reading porn might be an interesting stat! )
I dont know if they will release that granularity of data to me to do that level of cross analysis though. I somehow doubt it

It was a randomly selected survey but obviously the user could easily self select out of the pool. Still, 3,500 is loads to base an extrapolation on, frequently General Election polls are based on less.

DeV.

DeVore

There is a very high and highly clustered satisfaction rating with the site around the 8 mark. Indeed if you remove the upper and lower quartiles it pretty much zeros in on the 7-9 range.

Considering that this survey was taken during the Really Slow Period before the server upgrade, thats surprised me with the strength and uniformity of it.

Certainly its something to put in front of the "this site is going to ruin/mods are **** and everyone hates them" people. A nice vindication of our adminning style (admins/smods).

Happy enough with the results and we might well run these once every month or two as a means to support the site if that many people didnt mind answering that survey!

DeV.

Boston

Well the site is going to ruin. Don't take that the wrong way. Change is the same as ruin for some and this place is constantly changing. Every now and again I run into members from yester year and ask why they're not about anymore and its the usuall "cause its gone to crap" which I'm sure is true since the site certainly isn't what I signed up to. The difference is, most of the changes I've seen have been good things.

Goodshape

DeVore wrote:

There is a very high and highly clustered satisfaction rating with the site around the 8 mark. Indeed if you remove the upper and lower quartiles it pretty much zeros in on the 7-9 range.

Yeah, I noticed that. And also that the vast majority of users (75%) visit the site on a daily bases. That's got to be good results for any website. Congrats'

And cheers for posting the data too. That's a good cross-section of Irish Internet users. Interesting stuff.

nesf

Goodshape wrote:

Yeah, I noticed that. And also that the vast majority of users (75%) visit the site on a daily bases. That's got to be good results for any website. Congrats'

Well, being pedantic, daily users would have the highest chance of being randomly selected so I wouldn't attach much significance to that statistic.


What I found interesting was the low marks gotten for speed contrasted against the high overall score awarded by most people. People gave the site an 8 while saying that it was very slow, which is interesting.

r3nu4l

DeV, are these results taken from people who completed the survey in its entirety or does it include those who began the survey and didn't bother completing?

Also, was there any way to prevent the survey being completed a number of times by users (only allowing one form fill per IP)? Obviously this would stop a lot of users who visit the site from shared computers but equally it would stop someone (and bot scripts) from filling out the form a few times.

Just wondering really, nothing more. I filled it out and was happy with the breatdth of questions and scope for answers.

EDIT: I notice that the vast majority of users have a credit card whereas I doubt the vast majority have PayPal accounts. Is this a case for considering allowing subscription by cc? Doesn't matter to me as I have a PayPal account but it might make it easier for those that don't.

EDIT2: I also think that it might be time to consider getting into the job advert business considering that so many users access boards.ie from work. This could be localised to Leinster seeing as how the vast majority of users log in from there.

WhiteWashMan

id ;like to change my status from employed to student.

will this throw the balance of power towards the students?

Nothingcompares

I think it's a pity you didn't do more with the on-line activity survey questions.

12am-3am Rarely or never online 58%
3am-7am - Rarely or never online 85%

Doesn't really answer the question whether the regular back up from 3am-~3.45am should be pushed back an hour (or forward).

However, a simpler approach could have been to ask the question "Does the boards back up down time interfere with your boards.ie browsing?

Also, presumably, someone could be in full-time employment and a student at the same time?

It's a pity the location survey doesn't discriminate between people living in Leinster outside Dublin and people living in Dublin. As 70% of those surveyed live in Leinster, we can confirm that when someone says "Did you see that car crash in the city today" they're most likely to be talking about Dublin and not Galway, or Cork (15% and 8% respectively). However, it is bit of a leap of faith, (also assumes Kilkenny is not a city :0).

Presumebly with regard to the Family survey, A man, a woman (not married) and a baby equals 3 family members in a household. Presumaly a married couple equals 2 family members in a household. What does one man and one woman (unmarried equal)?
Good stats.

nesf

Nothingcompares wrote:

It's a pity the location survey doesn't discriminate between people living in Leinster outside Dublin and people living in Dublin. As 70% of those surveyed live in Leinster, we can confirm that when someone says "Did you see that car crash in the city today" they're most likely to be talking about Dublin and not Galway, or Cork (15% and 8% respectively). However, it is bit of a leap of faith, (also assumes Kilkenny is not a city :0).

Generally if someone on here posts in AH and refers to the city they are talking about Dublin. This was known long before any study was carried out.

Victor

Laika wrote:

Yeah I never realised we were such a minority!

Women talk too much :burns:

RuggieBear

Victor wrote:

Women talk too much :burns:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjxY9rZwNGU

Nothingcompares

The busiest fora on this site (based on number of posts) after After Hours are

1. Computers and Technology
2. Soccer
3. Motors

This is what we expect for a site primarily composed of 20-30 year old males. However, for a site born out of computer game discussion it has come a long way bridging the gender gap.

DeVore

R3nu4l wrote:

DeV, are these results taken from people who completed the survey in its entirety or does it include those who began the survey and didn't bother completing?

Also, was there any way to prevent the survey being completed a number of times by users (only allowing one form fill per IP)? Obviously this would stop a lot of users who visit the site from shared computers but equally it would stop someone (and bot scripts) from filling out the form a few times.

Renual, the first is a good question, I dont know the answer to it in fact. We didnt chose these questions, they were chosen for us by the advertising company who work for us as information they needed. If it were us there would have been a lot more "Daddy or Chips?" questions with a smattering of "Pie, Cake or Atari Jaguar".

We blocked by IP... its the best of the two options.

DeV.

DeVore

Nothingcompares wrote:

The busiest fora on this site (based on number of posts) after After Hours are

1. Computers and Technology
2. Soccer
3. Motors

This is what we expect for a site primarily composed of 20-30 year old males. However, for a site born out of computer game discussion it has come a long way bridging the gender gap.

Those are the busiest forums since the start.... ie the most posts. It doesnt mean that certain newer forums (like poker) arent the busiest but just havent had time to catch up.

DeV.

r3nu4l

DeVore wrote:

Renual, the first is a good question, I dont know the answer to it in fact. We didnt chose these questions, they were chosen for us by the advertising company who work for us as information they needed. If it were us there would have been a lot more "Daddy or Chips?" questions with a smattering of "Pie, Cake or Atari Jaguar".

We blocked by IP... its the best of the two options.

DeV.

Cheers DeVore. As someone who works in Communications (Medical) it's always useful to see how other companies outside the field operate their communications strategy.

/I've always loved that "Daddy or chips?" ad...so true

DeVore

Wow, weird... I just posted my latest in the "My Really Small Adventure" series of blogs. This one is about Medical Tourism and the use of websites in the medical field (and options abroad). Completely offtopic to this thread but a weird coincidence that you mention it just now!

I dont think any communications company would agree with the way Boards "communicates" with its users generally ....


DeV.

r3nu4l

I think the "communications" from boards.ie is reflective of its origins and doesn't need to change radically unless there is a complete change in policy and structure and you guys decide to go "corporate"

/Very interesting blog post!

copacetic

my ms office install is messed up at the moment (bloody 'important update' without the disc handy) anyone fancy posting a pdf of the survey results for me?

Stark

Here you go. Sorry the charts look crappy, OpenOffice.org messed them up and my version of Excel doesn't have PDF export.