PSA: Updates to Forum Rules (5/1/17)

Jaedenkaal

Starfury said:

No need to connect this with the 8 answers thread in any way, but the vaulting poll shows the problem with the rule about polls..

What are you supposed to do if you want to give participants a slightly more granular choice than good/bad?


The poll in question offered the options (boiled down):

• bad, scrap it
• needs major changes
• needs minor changes
• ok, could still use some work
• fine, doesn't need change
  

So 3 bad, 2 good. Would the poll be ok with a sixth option?

• awesome, definitely doesn't need change
  

Or you could read that as 4 negative options and one neutral option.

DeNappa said:

I know that @Ducky cited the 'poll choices must be unbiased'-rule when closing that thread, but when I look at it, in my opinion it's more that the question was formulated tendentious(ly?), and not so much the options. "Do you still hate..." assumes that you hated it in the first place.

I'd say that's still a reasonable interpretation of the rule. Especially if there are no "I never hated vaulting" choices

Starfury

Jaedenkaal said:

Or you could read that as 4 negative options and one neutral option.

You'd have to be pretty biased to attribute negativity if you see even the last one as just neutral.

Some polls just don't make sense with an equal amount of options for both sides. I'm not running around screaming bias when the census form comes with 8 options for being religious and just one for not being religious.

@Ducky Can you give us an example of how to formulate such a poll without violating forum rules? Just giving school grades can't be the answer as that would obviously be biased to positive answers.

Jaedenkaal

Starfury said:

You'd have to be pretty biased to attribute negativity if you see even the last one as just neutral.

Not really.

• bad, scrap it -- I really, REALLY don't like
• needs major changes - I really don't like
• needs minor changes - I don't like
• ok, could still use some work - I don't really like
• fine, doesn't need change - I don't care

Here's the problem with this poll. If 5 people answer, one answer per choice, then apparently 4/5 people still think vaulting isn't good and needs changes. Since there's only one positive answer to this question (at best), then the only responsible options are:

 - Still needs changes
 - Don't care
 - Doesn't need changes

Although even this isn't a very informative poll, because even people who think vaulting needs changes don't have to be the same people who don't like it. So really, what this discussion proves is why that poll didn't need to exist in the first place. Just have a thread where people can comment on what they think.

Starfury said:

Some polls just don't make sense with an equal amount of options for both sides. I'm not running around screaming bias when the census form comes with 8 options for being religious and just one for not being religious.

@Ducky Can you give us an example of how to formulate such a poll without violating forum rules? Just giving school grades can't be the answer as that would obviously be biased to positive answers.

That's a census, not a poll. Your religion is (arguably) more than just your opinion. Notice there's no "neutral" option on the census question regarding your age, either.

Ducky

***Polls should be written in a way that they effect the outcome of the result as little as possible. They should also have parity in the choices to allow the conversation around the poll to be balanced and constructive.

The original poll that Grimskald constructed was too negative as all but one of the choices inferred that vaulting didn't work. You can't exactly have a balanced conversation regarding a topic when it's set up to be overtly negative due to the poll choices.

Too often on the forums polls are formulated in a way to try and push an agenda by the way they are worded and we are actively making an effort to make sure this doesn't happen. If you want to make a poll, it should be as neutral as possible so that it results in constructive conversation about whatever the topic is and not a one sided rant. You can do that without the use of poll.

I hope this clarifies things.***

Alsmir

Why is there a limit to how many people can I ignore?