Attached Link: The Great Poser User Survey

In around 6 hours or so, I will be closing this first Great Poser User Survey down. Alhtough my workstation is temporarily disabled, I still expect to have the results publically available within a couple days, and to start making occasional postings about some of the data from those results shortly afterwards. The link for the results will be posted here when they are available. I want to publically thank all the people who have helped to make this first large scale survey an overwhelming success. RevManfred, Leanna, Casette, Lairemjd, and the sites of Renderosity, Animotions, Sixus1, and DAZ3D have all contributed to the survey's goals of creating a sort of "open source" poll method that's of value to everyone. I owe an apology to the spanish speaking members of the community as well -- due to the failure of my main system, I was never able to effectively finish setting up the spanish translation. I will make sure that it is absolutely perfect before the next one. On June 1st, of 2006, barring something horrific happening to me, I will post the next survey, which will be a bit more intense, and will reflect adaptations requested and noted in the process of getting this one out. When I started this, I was hoping for 768 responses. As I write this message prior to posting at several sites I have 735. For those of you who are familiar with the way that polling works, and know me, you can likely expect that the survey results will have an error margin of +/- 14%. I can't make it any tighter and retain anonymity, which is one of the most important aspects of this first survey. With this number of responses, however, the survey numbers are more than effective for what I'm estimating to be a combined userbase potential of roughly 1 and a half million people, of which 37% are active in the community overall. The statistics, incidentally, can be applied with the same level of accuracy to a userbase roughly 10 times that size. My sources for the size of the userbase are published reports from prior ownership and some third party information from a company I have worked with previously in other surveys. I have been criticized for requiring some demographic information that is commonly optional in the survey. My reasons for this requirement are that this is the first poser survey of this order done across such a wide swath of the community and to such a depth. This is a necessary requirement, imo, for this first survey, in order to establish what is usually referred to as baseline data, or commonly called "the givens". Going forward, that data can be adjusted and corrected as additional surveys (which I plan to present once every six months) are done. But without a baseline of information, conducting a serious survey of us -- that is, we, the people who use the darn thing -- would be useless for any truly meaningful purpose. Surveys are done over a broad range of time inorder to build up a dataset that has tremnedous reliability. That's what I'm attempting to do here, and I'm doing something that I'm also occasionally (and strictly in private) chucked upside the head for doing: making the data free. I'd like to say it's my way of "giving back" to the community. But no, that'd be wrong. I give back by occasionally being an annoyance to moderators, having fun with people I like to play wordgames with in the forums, and occasionally answering a question or two, as well as providing yet another damnable site to try and remember to visit for cool stuff. I'd like to say I'm doing it out of the goodness of my heart, but well, nope. I'm makign information that's typically something you pay a few thousand dollars for available to anyone who wants it becuase, well, I'm crazy. I happen to think that it is the best way to do things right now. It is in my best interests to see the community grow and develop and expand, and my experience tells me that this information is necessary to achieve that end. And then I'm doing it because at this point, after so many years int he community, I pretty much know someone I like a lot at damn near every site out there. And I like to treat my friends well. Its a failing, I know. I'm working on it. The June survey will be presented in a similar format, but be paginated, and, after some serious thought, will use cookies for session information. It will still retain anonymity for the end user, as one of the goals for this is to retain that critical aspect. By paginating and saving session information, the survey can be done over a greater amount of time, and will "remember" your answers -- it just won't remember you. From some of the data in this survey, you can expect the sites listed, figures listed, and programs listed to all increase. You can expect more detailed questions about the nature of products in specific (mesh density, texture sizes, etc). You can expect a more focused, but also somewhat more involved survey. Its a tradeoff, and making the call is never easy. Its not possible for me to fully and accurately answer all of the questions I've recieved about why I chose this site or that site, or why I left this figure out but kept that one, or even why the lists aren't all the same in this survey (there's reason to all of it, but it's rarely immediately obvious). I can say that no omission was intentional in the sense of wanting to "snub" someone or purposely leave anyone out. Thank you, to all of you. Each and every person who filled out a survey has earned my personal gratitude. I hope that you will be willing to share agin with me come June, and I promise that the rewards then will be much, much more exciting and varied :D Thank you Elle

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)