Thanks for the input on the summary Doug.

Yes, at some point we will begin releasing results. We're still trying to decide when, and then how often for updates after that.

Thanks to all for filling it out. Keep spreading the news.

He He, that was actually just something I tossed together while testing and didn't think would make it into the final version. But it was liked by the people who tested the system so it was left in.

Unfortunately not all answers really "fit the mold" easily and I didn't have time to make it tweak answer to make it "read well". So it's a pretty gnarly comprimise.

Maybe if a survey like this happens again I'll have time to fully massage that and help it always make more "readable" text out of peoples answers.

(FWIW, it was also a test of some ideas I've had for future letter writing applications....Instead of having people pick and choose paragraphs I'd like to ask them a series of questions and then based on their answers automatically suggest paragraphs for them. I think it's got a lot of potential for that area.)

Excellent! Thanks Doug.

Kevin, you should get a thank you page at the end. Is it possible you accidently hit the other button to change your answers, that one takes you back with your current answers filled in so it's easier for you to revise.

If you can't get the thanks page for some reason drop me a PM or e-mail and I'll try to figure out what's happing for you.

That would have been a good option.

The only other criticism I have is that one person can fill out the forms multiple times. Doesn't seem to validate the survey.

Vicki

They can....but there are safeguards in place to detect that kind of ballot stuffing. Any suspicious voting activity is brought to the attention of the TRT so that they can deal with the data as they see fit.

This was one of the most difficult parts of building the survey and the fact that nobody ihas been inconvienced by it is great vindication to me that I did my job well.

There are a number of difficulties to deal with - for example you can't just look for a bunch of votes coming from the same IP address since it is perfectally valid for all the members of a family to take the survey on the same computer. But the survey was to be anonymous so requiring logins would also be a bad idea.

We toyed with the idea of doing a confirmation system where you had to provide an e-mail address then would have a "key" e-mailed to you that you would need to use to cast your votes. But we were afraid that would make it too cumbersome for people.

The current system is very passive instead. It just watchs the incoming data and then lets the TRT know if anything suspicious happens. This way it dosn't inconvience the users and no votes are every "discounted" automatically without having a human look at the logs to confirm that something unfair is being done.

This was something I was very passionate about becuase as many of you know I'm not a big fan of on-line surveys at all because of how easily they can be manipulated. I won't go into details about how the anti-stuffing stuff works since that could potentially give people info on how to bypass it. But thankfully so far it does not look like anyone has tried to monkey with the system.

Oh my. Well, if there is any way to rescind my responses, please do so. What do you need from me to see that gets done?

Vicki

Vicki, I don't understand why you would want to recind your responses.

Regardless of your reasons, that is not possible. We built in the confirmation section at the end of the survey so dune users could review their answers for accurancy, or give them opportunity to opt out at that time, before hitting the 'submit' bitton.

Alrighty then. Thank you.

Vicki

We have over a hundred so far. Its still very early as we expect more activity as dune season acpproaches.

Please keep spreading the word. If you know someone without internet access, lets try and get them a paper copy or access to a computer.