[Burr]

As a student of marketing, I have access to the survey analysis program my college uses. I've only used it once so far, as part of a group project in my a marketing research course. I'm looking for an excuse to use it again.

The most interesting type of survey, to me, would be one that describes the topmudsites website's audience. The better you know the various market segments you are serving, the better you will be able to serve them. Also, by focusing the survey on the topmudsites audience, the information obtained could also be useful to a broad range of muds, in absence of surveys tailored to each one.

The thing is, though, I would need a <i>lot</i> of help getting the survey put together and collecting the data:

1) The tms community would have to help me brainstorm for useful questions to help define the various types of players. Or, well, you wouldn't have to; but it would make the questionnaire a hell of a lot better, since you are the experts when it comes to mudding. It's one thing to ask a player if they consider themselves an RPer or a PKer. It's another thing to define a type of player so well that you could theoretically design a mud <i>precisely</i> suited to their mudding preferences.

2) Topmudsites would have to host the survey. This means that, once I finish writing the questionnaire, you'd have to A) code the forms in HTML or whatever (since I don't know how to do this right now), B) collect the data into a decipherable spreadsheet (one row for each person who answers, and one column for each variable), C) advertise the survey on your pages (so that it will reach the audience it is intended for), and D) and then send me the data so that I can analyze it. (Or if you want, make the data available for public download, so that anyone who cares and has the capabilities could analyze it for themselves.) I'll then post any statistically significant results as I find them.

3) So that the survey is as accurate as possible, all the mud admins would need to agree not to act any differently when the survey comes up. Not only that, but you'd have to try and suppress any talk of the survey on your forums. If someone tells your players, "Hey! Go answer this survey at topmudsites," it could temporarily change the make-up of topmudsite's audience; the data we collect might then no longer be useful to anybody. In fact, it would likely be harmful to the mud who let the cat out of the bag, because the results of the survey would likely be skewed in such a way that more muds will try to take away the former mud's players.

So basically what I need to know now is whether the respective persons would be interested and willing to help with what I listed above.