rule Want to post a survey here? Read this first

[Ryn]

We've had a number of people now who have posted or are interested in posting surveys on the forum to gather responses from forum members. We don't generally discourage wanting to do this, because the responses can yield interesting insights. That said, we want to establish some base-line rules around what is required before we allow a survey to be posted. Our purpose in setting out these rules is to ensure participants' privacy is respected, that their time will not be wasted by participating, and that the community at large will benefit from contributing responses.

1. All surveys must be pre-approved by the mod team. Posting a survey without getting approval will result in it being deleted.
2. You can get approval to run a survey by DMing me or @ZineZ and including the following details:
   • Provide a link to the survey form you intend to post. The form should be complete and include every question you will be asking. You should also include a description of what you hope to get out of posting your survey and how you will analyze the data.
   • You should have some understanding or experience analyzing quantitative or qualitative data (depending on the kinds of questions you will be asking). Let us know in your DM what your experience is and couple it with your description of how you will be analyzing the gathered data.
   • Provide a minimum number of viable responses you need to perform your analysis, an ideal number of responses you would desire for a more fulsome analysis, and an approximate timeline for gathering those responses. We of course understand that participation frequency in your survey will vary, but please try and come up with a reasonable timeframe.
   • Provide an estimate of how long it will take you to analyze the data and prepare a draft of the analysis once you have received the requisite number of responses.
3. We may suggest additions or deletions from your proposed questions. We may make approval of your survey subject to you implementing the requested changes, depending on how important we feel they are.
4. We will require access to the raw data of all surveys before, during, and after the survey is posted on the forums. This means granting us access to the Google Form response spreadsheet or whatever other software platform you are using to collect the data.
5. We generally prefer that users proposing surveys are active and engaged members of the community. We don't want to outright deny someone who doesn't necessarily meet this criteria, but we are much less likely to approve the posting of a survey if we don't know who a person is, if they have very few posts on the forums, or if they are a brand new user.