Your chance to be heard: the official NSS News readers poll

[Dave Bunnell]

It began as a project for an advanced web design class but was something I'd always wanted to put together: a readers' opinion poll about the NSS News. Yes, you can now go online and express your opinions about the things that are run in the NSS News. It has 25 questions where you are asked to rate the various types of content we run, and a couple freeform text area answers to indicate things you'd like to see done differently or new ideas for regular features. It's online NOW at:

http://www.caves.org/pub/nssnews/survey.html

There's also a link from the NSS News home page on caves.org.

Please note that the survey asks you to input an NSS number at the beginning. Be assured that your results are still anonymous: this won't be used to look up your true identity. It's just a means to ensure that there are no duplicate records in the resulting database.

Please contact me directly if you run into any problems with the survey. It's been tested with firefox and IE, but only the newest versions. There is some javascript involved that could pose problems in really old browser versions.

[Cheryl Jones]

Thanks Dave!

Cheryl

[BrianC]

Great Idea Dave! I filled it out! Thanks

[cavedoc]

Was it supposed to have anwers already checked? All the 3s didn't bother me but I thought it odd that there was an answer checked on the title style question. How can you be sure that someone voted that way or just didn't plan on answering that question.

[Dave Bunnell]

Roger,

The reason all the radio buttons have a check is that the data file depends on seeing a response to each question, and if one response were dropped, it could throw every data item off. I could have used a bunch of javascript that nagged people if they didn't answer something but I know that can be annoying, so I just went with the neutral response. For the text areas it doesn't matter if there is a response or not.

But on the style question, you're right, because the responses are not on an ordinal scale. I'd picked the one that basically says leave it as is, but perhaps I will just add another pre-checked button that says "have no opinion" on this topic. I have to add some code to deal with replies in the longer text areas where some folks are hitting returns and this creates extra lines in the data file, so I need to revise the survey page a little anyway...although at this point I can't add questions to it in case anyone thought to make suggestions on that.

Dave

[newmudpuppy]

Just took the survey. No problems, and a very user-friendly survey! Thanks!