Many thanks to everyone who has taken the survey. We have had 34 responses, and the feedback has been very useful.
The survey is now linked as "Feedback" in the forum footer, same as with the previous survey. Members who haven't taken it are welcome to do it from there.
I thought our users would be interested in seeing some of the results. I won't share the textual responses, as some of those contain private information. But below is a summary the responses to all multiple-choice questions.
It is somewhat surprising how dominant Chrome is in comparison to Firefox. As far as I know, this is not reflected in worldwide use statistics.
It looks like about 1 out of every 10 of our users disable JavaScript. In a community of our size, this is a significant number of users. My interpretation of this figure is that we should continue making judicious use of JavaScript to add new features, while at the same time making sure there is appropriate fallback code for those who disable it.
I suppose the biggest surprise here is that there do exist some members who don't check the forum more than once per day.
Here, I should have added a "never" option. As this is, we can't tell which part of the green option are users who never check the forum from a cell phone. But even with that, it looks like the majority of our users do come here from their cells quite often. Though see the responses to the next question as well.
Despite the fact that more and more of us use our cell phones for browsing, the majority of visits still come from, for lack of a better term, regular computers.
In the battle of the forum skins, Classic and Bright are now tied (in the last survey, Bright was ahead). This could be attributed to two factors: 1) Since the last survey, a large number of changes have been made to the Classic skin, to make it more similar to Bright (same fonts and font-sizes, same URL styling), while keeping its distinguishing features that many appreciate (blue background, lower contrast backgrounds). 2) The Dark skin was created, and most of its users migrated from the Bright skin.
It is also noteworthy that the Dark skin now claims almost a quarter of our users.
Moving on to a series of questions about the forum header. A large majority of our users either prefer the new header design, or are ambivalent/indifferent. So it looks like we'll be sticking with the new design.
An overwhelming majority of users also prefers the new click-based header menus to their old, hover-based versions. That's assuming, of course, that they have JavaScript enabled (see previous question on this issue).
Last one about the header, it seems that our users are much more divided on the issue of what articles should show up in the "News" drop-down menu. Still, a majority says it should be limited to one article per newspaper.
The admin team likes to agonize about the size of the forum index. But the great majority of users think it's about the right size.
Finally, 9 out of 10 users think our forum compares favorably to other NS forums, with the remaining 1 out of 10 thinking they're all about the same. There's obviously a good amount of bias there, but it's always good to see our members are generally satisfied with what we have.
The above and the textual responses indicate that there is great demand for a mobile-friendly skin. There is one under development currently, though it's progressing very slowly. The admin team will try to prioritize that.
The survey is now linked as "Feedback" in the forum footer, same as with the previous survey. Members who haven't taken it are welcome to do it from there.
I thought our users would be interested in seeing some of the results. I won't share the textual responses, as some of those contain private information. But below is a summary the responses to all multiple-choice questions.
It is somewhat surprising how dominant Chrome is in comparison to Firefox. As far as I know, this is not reflected in worldwide use statistics.
It looks like about 1 out of every 10 of our users disable JavaScript. In a community of our size, this is a significant number of users. My interpretation of this figure is that we should continue making judicious use of JavaScript to add new features, while at the same time making sure there is appropriate fallback code for those who disable it.
I suppose the biggest surprise here is that there do exist some members who don't check the forum more than once per day.
Here, I should have added a "never" option. As this is, we can't tell which part of the green option are users who never check the forum from a cell phone. But even with that, it looks like the majority of our users do come here from their cells quite often. Though see the responses to the next question as well.
Despite the fact that more and more of us use our cell phones for browsing, the majority of visits still come from, for lack of a better term, regular computers.
In the battle of the forum skins, Classic and Bright are now tied (in the last survey, Bright was ahead). This could be attributed to two factors: 1) Since the last survey, a large number of changes have been made to the Classic skin, to make it more similar to Bright (same fonts and font-sizes, same URL styling), while keeping its distinguishing features that many appreciate (blue background, lower contrast backgrounds). 2) The Dark skin was created, and most of its users migrated from the Bright skin.
It is also noteworthy that the Dark skin now claims almost a quarter of our users.
Moving on to a series of questions about the forum header. A large majority of our users either prefer the new header design, or are ambivalent/indifferent. So it looks like we'll be sticking with the new design.
An overwhelming majority of users also prefers the new click-based header menus to their old, hover-based versions. That's assuming, of course, that they have JavaScript enabled (see previous question on this issue).
Last one about the header, it seems that our users are much more divided on the issue of what articles should show up in the "News" drop-down menu. Still, a majority says it should be limited to one article per newspaper.
The admin team likes to agonize about the size of the forum index. But the great majority of users think it's about the right size.
Finally, 9 out of 10 users think our forum compares favorably to other NS forums, with the remaining 1 out of 10 thinking they're all about the same. There's obviously a good amount of bias there, but it's always good to see our members are generally satisfied with what we have.
The above and the textual responses indicate that there is great demand for a mobile-friendly skin. There is one under development currently, though it's progressing very slowly. The admin team will try to prioritize that.