| A lot of folks gave valid answers. Some were clueless. The early thread that went off topic was very funny. So were the sex-crazed answers of Deca-Z which fit the dual General and Technical theme nicely. Sex always sells, I guess. A couple of people were on the right track. Sportzcoop started the right line of logic by using a question that referred back to the Forums. Arturo Z was close, but I didn't give it to him because of grammar and spelling. Midnight Z had a nice double-duality going. Spee was zeroing in. Although I believe he benefited from the posts that came before him, he wins the five dollars for being the closest. The question that would have to be double posted in both the General and Technical Forums in order to get an accurate answer is: "Do you spend more time surfing in the General or Technical Forum?" Since the question deals with users of both forums, by not double posting you would severely bias your responses. You need a random sampling from both Forums. Even though most users probably participate in both Forums, you cannot rely on this for a given time period after the question is posted. You could get accurate individual answers by posting in one Forum. However, you would not have enough info from users in the other Forum to determine the overall user prevalence of both Forums. Details: Most likely, the simple response rate to the question from each Forum would yield an accurate overall answer, if one assumed that at any given point in time a person is most likely to be found in his or her Forum of choice. You would capture this by scoring the responses from the outliers in each group that were "visiting" and caught in their non-favorite Forum. They might possibly represent an independent variable that could significantly change the overall prevalence use of each Forum. Another kind of bias that enters into this is "responder" bias, or whether or not the type of person that will respond to a post is representative of the population in question. The assumption would be that the effect of responder bias would cancel out between the two Forums. However, one could argue that the two different Forums attract different personality types, which could create a different response rate to the question. The bottom line is the question is moot, since probably the administrators can answer the same question more accurately and quickly by looking at the traffic patterns on the site with their computers, and bypass all these survey-response pitfalls. That was my short answer ;c)
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13:39:45 02/20/03
