Obligatory census

[Veho]

I wanted to have an introduction here, but I just can't word it well enough. Oh well.

The problem with polls in this forum is that the sample is not representative. The only people who vote in polls are people who are generally inclined to take polls, or have strong opinions on the subject, or generally have nothing better to do. That means that any given poll is inaccurate, and the results are crude at best, as no poll covers the entire active population of this forum.

This is okay with the usual polls, like "DS Lite: What colour?" or "Pasta or Gnocchi", but not with polls regarding the general makeup of the forum, like age or gender, which I think would be interesting to know. I'm surprised the admins don't show more interest here. Yes, I know there've been polls on those topics, but as I said, the results of those are wildly inaccurate at best. Knowing that 25 percent of people who would take a poll is 25-30 years old has no bearing on the actual percentage of people between 25 and 30 on the forum.

People are prejudiced against forums, games, game forums, game piracy all in one, and familiar stereotypes are: only kids play videogames, only males attend Internet forums, let alone gaming forums, only prepubescent attention whores ever post anything. So a lot of GBATEMP newcomers bear the (false) assumtion that GBATEMP is full of prepubescent attention whoring boys who download everything but the air that they breathe. The opposite applies: people seeing a newcomer (and assuming he's a prepubescent attention whoring brat who'd download... you get the idea) automatically assume the first post (s)he posts will be "how I run GBA on R4 lol". This is not anyone's fault; this is how it has always been. I myself have been surprised to find out, for example, the number of girls on this forum.

So I propose an obligatory census on topics admins deem relevant, starting with age and gender. When a member logs in, or before the front page loads, let them answer those two questions before they are allowed to enter. It's not such a big deal, clicking two option buttons. And the results should clear up a thing or two.

Think about it.

 

[Costello]

When we do polls in general, and I mean polls such as what is the best next gen console, we don't expect to obtain results that are representative of the general opinion.
What we really want is to hear what our members have to say. It's only a matter of how you read the results, but polls are actually a very useful tool that helps us (the staff) make decisions, even important ones.
Of course you can't get an objective result out of opinion oriented polls, the context is clearly biased.

So I propose an obligatory census on topics admins deem relevant, starting with age and gender. When a member logs in, or before the front page loads, let them answer those two questions before they are allowed to enter. It's not such a big deal, clicking two option buttons. And the results should clear up a thing or two.

There's already a profile field for your age (actually the birth date but I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out the age of a person by reading their date of birth).

 

[Hadrian]

I did suggest a census a while ago but my one was more to see what people were like here and erm not to be much use.

 

[Veho]

There's already a profile field for your age (actually the birth date but I'm sure you're smart enough to figure out the age of a person by reading their date of birth).
That's true, but I'd need to check a thousand people to see the age spread for the frequently active forum members. Yes, I sound like an advertising agency researching a target audience

I'm just saying it would be nice to have an average of the active forum users, so that when we post something, we have an idea of who would be reading it.

QUOTE(hadrian @ Oct 25 2007, 11:44 AM)I did suggest a census a while ago but my one was more to see what people were like here and erm not to be much use.

That's what I had in mind too. I don't know if it would be of any use to the forum staff, but it would be nice to know.

 

[Costello]

FYI.
CODESELECT AVG(bday_year) FROM ibf_members WHERE (bday_year IS NOT NULL) AND (bday_year0)
Result: 1983.0135
Only about 3000 members filled this field in their profile though.
Explanation: this is the average year of birth of all the members who filled this field in their profile.
It's not a required profile field, and not so long ago it didnt show up on the registration page (few people care to go to their profile page and edit their profile).


Edit:
Some people put random dates in their profile. A bunch of years of birth are like 1900~1910 or so.
Past these dates, there's a large gap (1926, 1935, 1952).
So let's do another request with all dates > 1950.

SELECT AVG(bday_year) FROM ibf_members WHERE (bday_year IS NOT NULL) AND (bday_year > 1950)

The average is still: 1983.6519

 

[BoneMonkey]

its just a video game forum

/end thread

 

[Veho]

Thanks, Costello

Of course, that's only three thousand out of almost a hundred thousand members, and there's no telling if those members are active at all...

You know what, don't mind me, I'm a nitpicker.