Forum: General Topic: "joke/protest" categories? Author Message jonathan #1 posted June 27, 2000 at 10:40pm (EST)   I think the "survey central" category works just fine for those sorts of meta-surveys. One person's joke is another person's burning issue or something like that. jonathan

Forum: General Topic: Tougher qualification Author Message jonathan #2 posted June 22, 2000 at 1:12pm (EST)   I'm not sure just increasing the number of positive votes necessary would actually increase survey quality, though it might slow down the number of new surveys a bit. Here's a thought: if an unqualified survey gets more than N "needs work" votes, the survey is nuked. So just as a survey has to have a certain number of positive (5) votes to pass, it has to have less than a certain number of negative votes to even exist in the first place. Or maybe it's something like if N > (Reasonable - Needs Work) then the survey is nuked. jonathan

Forum: General Topic: Allowing users to pay to not see banners Author Message jonathan #3 posted June 21, 2000 at 4:46pm (EST)   I disagree w/your assumptions re: how much you'd need to charge. The problem is a bit more complex than that for a couple of reasons. Markets, not money: Your revenues are really being driven by two things: usage by users, and growth in the number of users. So you want to find ways to drive up the average use per user (for users who aren't paying a subscription fee), and grow your user base. Your most valuable users are not necessarily the ones with high usage, but are the ones who drive up the average use per user (i.e. by creating interesting surveys & comments that people will want to read) and/or ones who bring in new users. Identifying those users and offering them perks or something could help your revenue stream more than a flat-rate subscription would. Relative values of customers: In looking at the top 10 users for average use by user to see what you'd need to charge so you wouldn't lose money, you're missing the fact that there's the "average" user who might be making a lot less money for you on a per-ad basis than the high-usage user, but who you could charge more for the subscription service. AT&T's TrueUSA plan is an example of this, $2.95/month for 20 minutes of "free" calls and then $0.10/minute after that or something like that. AT&T did the research to figure out that the average customer made less than 20 minutes of calls, so that they're making a bunch off of all those customers who sign up for the plan and don't use their free usage allowance, and making a decent profit off the customers who are using more than the 20 free minutes. So in doing a flat rate plan you might lose a bit on the high usage users, but their value in driving other users' usage might very well offset that "loss." If you want to talk more on this Bill, send me email or give me a call. I used to develop and analyze rate plans for assorted online services back in my Kenan/Lucent days. jonathan

Forum: Site_Feedback Topic: I just saw the same problem as Nihon whe... Author Message jonathan #4 posted May 31, 2000 at 11:18am (EST)   I just saw the same problem as Nihon when using the This Month's survey selector. The first page o' surveys appears fine, but the next and successive batches show the State column instead of the New Comments/Ranking column.

Forum: Site_Feedback Topic: I'm finding that too many new surveys ar... Author Message jonathan #5 posted May 31, 2000 at 11:01am (EST)   I'm finding that too many new surveys are showing up for me to keep up w/SC, as much as I would like to. Maybe the number of votes for qualification could be increased a bit so that the rate of surveys being qualified could be decreased? I know I'm just one vote, I'm just putting the idea out as feedback.

Forum: Site_Feedback Topic: I think I found an old bug that has reap... Author Message jonathan #6 posted May 8, 2000 at 9:22am (EST)   I think I found an old bug that has reappeared. I was using the What's New survey selector and had 126 surveys on the list. When I got to surveys 101-125, there was no link for survey 126 nor did the catch-up button appear.

Forum: Site_Feedback Topic: drdt - the What's New and other survey s... Author Message jonathan #7 posted February 25, 2000 at 11:28am (EST)   drdt - the What's New and other survey selectors that show recent surveys w/comments appear to be used by a lot of the regular users, so conversations w/those people on still active surveys are fair game.

Forum: Site_Feedback Topic: bill, two more comments on the chat: - ... Author Message jonathan #8 posted February 11, 2000 at 8:37am (EST)   bill, two more comments on the chat: - When I use a survey selector or other link to leave the chatroom, the Chat count of users shows that I'm still in the chat room. - Having the ad refresh on every comment is a little annoying.

Forum: Site_Feedback Topic: I like the chat, have the following comm... Author Message jonathan #9 posted February 10, 2000 at 11:53am (EST)   I like the chat, have the following comments: - make the refresh rate faster or configurable (I'm used to IRC and talk which are best effort which means on a fast link it's pretty real-time). - I like being able to insert links, but if someone doesn't finish with the "> or </a> then things get really screwed up in the next refresh and don't get fixed at all until someone makes a comment in a following refresh, and even then it's a little messy. - Having something other than the .. for the 7th column would be cool. - It's not clear what the [#] is under Chat, is that the number of current users?

Forum: Site_Feedback Topic: I believe there's a bug in the user tota... Author Message jonathan #10 posted January 18, 2000 at 6:29pm (EST)   I believe there's a bug in the user totals in the statistics page. The total active SC users is N (currently 230), while the total number of females (131) plus males (100) is N+1. If it was the other way around, then we'd have a sexless SC user which might be totally possible, but in this case I think it's a bug. Next page (only 10 shown here)