Criteria to Judge Best Search Forum

[rustybrick]

I am going to run a survey asking people to vote which SEM forum they think is the best. Now, I will require people to vote on a scale from 1 - 5 or 1 - 10 on different variables and characteristics.

Some characteristics that they would vote on would include;
- Friendliness
- Professionalism
- Helpful
- Tech Savvy
- and so on.

I was hoping to ask you guys, what you think. What criteria would you like to see on such a survey?

[Woz]

The topic is very subjective rather than objective. This means that the main challenge with running any form of survey like this is the use of qualitative questions rather than quantitative ones, which makes the results very opinionated. Asking something like member numbers of page views is easy to anwser, although I suspect you would not get those answeres from most if not all forum owners.

But asking a subjective question regarding, for example, Friendliness, would evoke answers on both sides of the coin and with equeal merit. Some people are more conforatble here, others more comfortable at SEW, some like the chattiness of TW, and so on. Each would then suggest that their own favourite forum is the more friendly and rightly so. But that does not mean that any one forum is overall more friendly than any other because of the inherant subjective views each respondant would proffer.

Equally, "Helpful" is also a very subjective question. I would tend to think that for matters pertaining to the Asia-Pacific region, [warning - blatant self promotion] then our own Asia-Pacific Forum would probably top the bill, but only for those interested in that field. [end blatant self promotion]. For matters of an Affiliate nature, then I guess Haiko's place would be the top contender, but again, only for those interested in that field.

"Tech Savvy" - Well, depends on whether you are interested in htaccess files (I'm not) or Keyword research (I am).

I think if you are going to run any form of poll like this then you need to look very carefully at not only the quesitons asked, but also the motivating criteria behind those quesitons.

They say that more important than knowing the answer, is knowing which question to ask. I would suggest that it is probably even more important to know WHY the question is being asked.

Onya
Woz

[jk3210]

Quality of Information Available

Level of Information Sharing between Members

Quality of Moderators

Quality of Special Events where the objective is to drink as much as possible.