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Fun was definitely had. Also that sweet spot where fun and frustration overlap. Some of these were very clever. "Milky Way" in particular took me forever to get to. Anyway, thanks for running it.

The first results thread is up here! Dikiyoba is correct, btw, as one of the first graphs will attest. (Although I imagine people who weren't me may have also given friends a heads up in 2012; we didn't ask about it then.)

The Grand Spiderweb Poll Results PART ONE: DEMOGRAPHICS & MISC. RESULTS Thanks to everyone who took part in the poll! There were 59 responses submitted. The responses included many long-time members, some newer members and some posters who just happened to drop in. I expect this group is typical of the sort of people who are here over any one week period. Results and analysis begin here, but will be continued in a number of other threads. This thread presents only the base results, with no correlations made to unrelated questions, and only for the demographics and misc. parts of the poll. Two things you should keep in mind: 1) CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. This thread only contains a few correlated questions, but please keep in mind that the results are solely correlative. 2) SAMPLE SIZE IS SMALL. It's probably not a good idea to generalize these results too much, especially beyond the forum community. I made the graphs smaller this time, but if any are squished on your screen, you can right-click to open the image in its own tab. OK, let's begin! Similar to 2012, but with a few less people who still claim to have their sanity. The average respondent has been here more than 10 years! In 2012, the average respondent was here for a little over 6 years. The big increase makes sense considering that 47/59 survey takers were already here 5 years ago. The two more recent satellite communities were well-represented. This is particularly impressive for Shadow Vale, considering that it's now been closed for six years! We did not ask this in 2012. We did not ask this in 2012 either. Each bar is one member. This graph makes it apparent what a high portion of their lives many users have spent connected to the forums. The bigger take-away, though, is how old we are now. The average member is now almost 32 and was 21 when they joined. In 2012, the average member was 26 and was 20 when they joined. Also, in 2012, we still had a decent number of teenagers around: not so much anymore. This is to be contrasted with the early days of the forums, when there were maybe even a majority of very young members. My guess is this is a reflection of bigger societal changes. But this raises the possibility that Spiderweb games are attracting a different demographic than they used to. Of course, it may just be that we've all gotten older and more boring and less likely to attract young people ourselves New to this year's survey. The "Nonbinary" column's full name (which wouldn't fit) is: Nonbinary, Female and Nonbinary, None but Male Presenting This question did not exist in a serviceable format in 2012. There were just a handful of people who didn't identify as male on that survey. Now this question gets interesting. I consulted with some other users on how to best phrase this question and its answers, and they suggested I take out the third answer. I left it in because I really didn't want anyone to feel like there was not an adequate description for them. Based on the answer tuples, however, I hypothesize that that answer ("I prefer neither") ended up being used for a very different purpose than what I expected. It was chosen almost entirely by members who identify as male and as straight (and who are regular or semiregular posters). While it's possible that SW has a bunch of trans men who aren't open about their status and don't like the term "trans", that seems unlikely. My guess is it was used mostly by people who are accurately described as cis, but who are not used to labelling themselves. (See Markedness.) Unfortunately, this means we don't have any solid numbers when it comes to trans survey responses. However, I bet there are still going to be some pretty interesting correlations with the "I prefer neither" category! The "None Given" column's full name (which wouldn't fit) is: None Given, None, Asexual, or Not Sure Yet These numbers are pretty similar to 2012. These are a bit higher. The "Yes" category includes anyone who: * chose any non-binary gender, or * chose Trans, or * chose any non-Straight orientation Slightly more of us have moved on from the single life. I guess that comes with age. Compared to 2012, there are about 10 more people in urban locations and about 10 fewer people in rural locations. This is probably just explained by the new age demographics. Atheism and non-denominational theism are slightly more popular than in 2012, while the explicitly religious options are less popular, particularly the "extremely serious" option. These have all progressed slightly, as you'd expect from the age shift. A dramatic shift here: about 15 fewer students and about 15 more full-time employed people. That alone might account for the lower activity level on the boards. This graph presents family wealth, and current wealth, with the size of each circle indicating how many members reported that particular combination. Yellow circles are people who have maintained a similar wealth level (or who are receiving financial support from their family). Green circles are people who have climbed the wealth ladder, and orange circles are those of us who have fallen down at least one rung. The five categories, left to right and top to bottom, were: Poor, Working Class, Lower Middle Class, Upper Middle Class, Very Wealthy. The average respondent is and was Lower Middle Class, as they reported things, which is a bit less wealthy than was the case in 2012. A new question this year. Also a new question. The answers might have been very different 5 years ago, to say nothing of 10 or 15. All right, here's the dreaded political views question! If you don't like the labels, ignore them. As was the case five years ago, the results themselves aren't very interesting, but they may still be able to suggest some slight tendencies when correlated with other questions. The results are fairly similar to 2012. There has been a slight leftward shift on social views (more Libertarian answers and fewer Conservative) Also pretty similar to 2012. A new question. Also a new question. A third new transportation question. Really looking forward to correlations here. I didn't make a graph for the arrest history question because only 7 of us have been arrested. (It did not correlate with gun use, either :P) In 2012, this question was "pick one" instead of pick as many as you like, so all of these numbers are much higher. The average user picked 3 genres this time. Classical, electronic, and jazz benefited from this change the most. About the same as 2012. Also remarkably similar. New question. They were all fairly close for the first couple of days, but water really shot up in the last 20 or so responses. Clear favourite here. In retrospect, maybe this shouldn't have surprised me. It still did. A landslide for cats. This even bigger landslide definitely didn't surprise me. Okay, here's a bunch of new questions with perhaps predictable answers: There were no vegans. Is happiness a warm gun? Find out, when the correlations come out to play! No wonder "What are you reading?" is our longest-running active thread. Pretty evenly distributed. Yup. Excuuuuuuse me, EverQuest. I'm out of witty comments. I mean, OK, that may have happened a while ago... No one chose 1972 - 1984. Whew! Okay, that's all the questions outside of the ones about Spiderweb games. Those will probably go up tomorrow, to be followed later by correlations. Woo.

The 2017 poll is now closed. There were a total of 59 responses. (In 2012, there were 60 responses.) Analysis is underway, but as an appetizer, here is the contents of the last field, in random order (with redactions for references to other answers, personal information, and personal messages): In conclusion... In conclusion, Hai ^-^ In conclusion, No one warned me about the fluffy turtles when I joined. In conclusion, Mmm. In conclusion, I'm a forum lurker who has spent a massive amount of time to Spiderweb games since the Exile trilogy. In conclusion, Man, it's been a while In conclusion, i'm glad to be part of this community In conclusion, I wonder how often anyone's stolen a mobile home that they were renting. I mean its not like they have licence plates or anything and they all look the same. In conclusion, Thank you! In conclusion, This community helped me grow into the man I am today, so I hope it burns in hell ;p In conclusion, i love you In conclusion, Having answered all the questions, I feel like I'm not nearly the geek I used to be. Or, I have become a different kind of geek... In conclusion, Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. In conclusion, <3 Sorry I'm distant. In conclusion, Please bring out some more games, Jeff! In conclusion, Fun, interesting survey. In conclusion, My alias originated from the (redacted) Avernum (redacted) character, (redacted). I've retained that name for the last 12 years. I <3 Spiderweb In conclusion, Eyyy! A poll that caters for my general need for a sense of community and validation? This is what I live for! In conclusion, Hi, you're neat! In conclusion, ... In conclusion, Splunge. In conclusion, Long time lurker in the Spiderweb community. Never actively participated. Love the game mechanics breakdowns. Modded a lot of scripts in most of the games. In conclusion, AVERNUM 3 RUINED WORLD IS GOING TO BE AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In conclusion, This retrospective was fun. Totally stoked to see what everyone else said. In conclusion, yarr.

The Nine-Headed Cave Cow smiles upon this topic.

Final reminder: the poll closes tomorrow morning. You can take it HERE

That's a good point. Spiderweb is not in a vacuum, and social media has changed a lot of things, culturally, when it comes to this kind of thing.

You know what I miss about the old Spiderweb? (edit for clarity: relatively old, circa 05-09) When someone took a chance on some creative endeavor, no matter how imperfect the end result was, people were happy it was there. Criticisms and suggestions would get shared -- of course. We're super critical here, I as much as anyone else. But people did not take imperfections in the endeavor as some kind of personal affront. EDIT FOR CONTEXT: Per Kel's suggestion, he is removing a comment and I am removing the second half of this post, which was a direct response to it.

This is an easy fix but it comes with a drawback: a lot of people skip most optional questions regardless of whether they are inaccessible to them. In designing the survey, I therefore weighed the possible discomfort of having to choose an option that isn't a perfect fit, with having a smaller dataset with less ability to produce interesting correlations. This is why questions that are typically sensitive issues (the gender and sexuality questions) ARE skippable, but most of the others aren't. (Edit: I also tried to consider the likelihood of someone who didn't want to answer just picking a random answer, which is why the element question is also skippable, but questions with answers that probably anyone can respond to off the top of their head, like how they feel about the RPG genre, are not.) Here's the thing. There are basically two directions for a survey like this. One direction is to focus on the small-picture and to have a copy-and-paste, text-based survey. This gives everyone complete control over their answer to every question. The priority is allowing everyone to express themselves with perfect precision. The other direction is to focus on the big-picture, on patterns and trends that cover the group rather than details that cover the individual. In theory you can still do this with a free-answer survey (or with a survey like this one, but that had an "Other" option on every question). However, when you go that route, one of two things happens: 1. You have an extremely limited ability to find patterns and correlations, due to all the unique answers 2. The person doing the analysis makes judgment calls about how to group answers, thus colouring the results with their own personality and way of thinking to a potentially extreme degree By not allowing free expression on most questions, the judgment call is instead made by the person answering the survey. OF COURSE their personal political opinion is a lot more nuanced than the options given here -- that's true for most of us -- but this way, they are the one making the call as to which category is a better fit. I think that is more respectful of their ability to articulate who they are; and it is definitely more neutral for purposes of the survey results than having the analyzing party make that call. A similar point is relevant when deciding how many options to give for each question. Do you satisfy every possible answer, or do you force people to make compromises and choose the best one? In unusual cases (as with Nikki on the dog/cat question) this can put someone in an impossible position, for which I sympathize but do not apologize. No categorizing task can ever reflect reality perfectly; if you expect it to, you are walking into a trap, whether you are taking a survey or reading about its results. There are always places where the pattern doesn't line up. I am not going to pretend there aren't, but neither am I going to abandon the whole analytical enterprise on their account.

BUMP FOR THE WEEKEND: If you haven't taken the poll yet, it's still open this weekend. It will close Monday morning. It should take 5-10 minutes to take the survey, and you can do so here: TAKE THE GRAND SPIDERWEB POLL! (And remember to hit "submit" on the last page, so your answers are recorded.)

Sort of. I mean, you're right, those things are technically possible according to our laws, but in cultural terms they aren't possible. Most people treat civic and religious marriage is one synonymous entity, and the government makes no effort to suggest otherwise, even using the same term. ("Civic marriage" vs "religious marriage" is a very different story than "marriage" vs" marriage" is.) And where other terms have been used (e.g., civil unions) a very clear line has been drawn indicating that they are different from marriage.

This is true, but it can also be fulfilled by something other than marriage if legislation backs that up. It would be 100% possible to sever the civic and religious aspects of marriage, whether both are still called marriage or one is called something else. Civic marriages are available to everyone; religious marriages are at the discretion of a given religion, and can be aligned with civic marriages or not, again at that religion's discretion. This was always my preferred solution.

1. There already were religious denominations that did accept same sex marriages. By picking a definition of marriage that lined up with some religions, but not others, wasn't that exactly parallel to the "trampling on the rights" you're discussing? 2. Churches are treated differently under the law than commercial enterprises in many, many, many ways. A better comparison in most cases would be secular nonprofit organizations.

Per Wikipedia, 'Critics have accused the order of being a "Muslim ban" because the order only targeted Muslim-majority countries [2] and because Trump's advisers called it a "Muslim ban" [3]' It is obviously not a ban on all Muslims, but it affects mostly Muslims, and that is the language its progenitors use to describe it, so...

There is not. This is probably for the best, given spambots and email address collectors. I suppose you could just put it into one of the other contact info fields, though -- I don't think most of them check for particular entry formats.

Kel, I can't tell you what the original source for those definitions was -- it was five years ago and I don't remember. My guess is they were paraphrased from Political Compass threads. What I can tell you is that last time around, despite some hearty discussion and criticism of other questions on the survey, over multiple threads, no one gave any suggestions, criticism, or feedback about those questions (with one exception: Dantius suggested adding a fifth "moderate" or "liberal" option to the economic views question). No one had any criticism for the labels used in them at all. So, forgive me for being a little surprised by the complaints this time around.

There is plenty of room between "should uphold" and "trample" (which is not language I used for any of the options).

As I stated earlier, the labels weren't really helpful, but I kept them for the ability to compare with the questions from five years ago. It sounds like if this option didn't have a label, that you don't identify with, you'd have had no problem here. I would suggest, however, that if you look at the breadth of social views in the U.S., there are a lot of people who identify as "conservative," who are described by others as "socially conservative," and who fit perfectly with the social views answer labelled as "conservative." Whatever political self-identification you may have, you are certainly much less socially conservative than a very large chunk of the country, if the best description for you was the one included "uphold minority rights."

Also, alhoon, you keep editing your posts to tone them down after other people have already replied to them. It just happened with your post above and Lilith's response. While I applaud the thought process there and use it myself, it works a lot better if you do it before you post. Once someone else has read your post and replied, it's a little bit like pulling the rug out from under them to go and edit your post substantially.

Again, however, I will point out that the two political questions specified economic views and social views. "Liberal" only showed up in the social views question. All of the things alhoon listed off in parentheses are economic issues (and contrary to what ADoS claims here, "Libertarian" was also only listed under social views, so it did not include those things either). What the poll actually used: "Liberal: the government should avoid interfering with personal liberty, and it should uphold minority rights, but some things are just so immoral or socially destructive we can ban those" I think that is a pretty good summary of the socially liberal position in the U.S. and on the Political Compass and as discussed on the forums. For the first time in a long time, Triumph didn't say it better

The forums are in English. The poll is in English. This is not an "English only" thing, this is a "we communicate almost exclusively through writing on this forum so there has to be one language we all use" thing. Isn't this standard operating procedure for being on the Internet? Especially when you visit a site where most people have a different set of life experiences then you do? I'm having a hard time seeing a problem here. As an aside, this appears to be the same thing that comes up in Geneforge debates: you have missing knowledge (due to not wanting to play G1, and missing parts of other games) but that leads you to complain and to demand that everyone else* tailor their comments to your unique situation. That's just not how communication works. *Including games that came out 14 years ago.

The reality is that, while there are people from all over the world who access these boards (and they are all very welcome)... at the end of the day, the culture here is overwhelmingly anglophone and also predominantly American. I state this as a neutral observation. It's just the way things are. So in some categories, attempts to make things more global would actually make them move further away from the culture of the boards themselves. The political questions are an example of this. When I wrote them five years ago, they were heavily influenced by the recurring Political Compass threads as well as by the many political discussions and debates that have taken place here -- and which most frequently turn on U.S. politics. The gender and sexuality questions, similarly, were rebuilt this year around the ways those things tend to be discussed on the forums and in the community here. (And they have "Other" options precisely to make sure nobody felt excluded.) Honestly, I am a little confused by the expectation that a single survey could somehow be culturally accessible to the entire world. -- Finally, I received a private complaint that the survey was hard to understand for people who have poor English. Really didn't know what to say to that!

Context matters here. The questions were explicitly asking about social views and economic views, not political affiliation. The questions would be better without the initial labels, which weren't really necessary. I considered removing those. However, these were some of the questions that were used five years ago; removing the labels would make it harder to compare the new results with the old results.

New game, easily. Though I would be happy to see a G1 remake, the Spiderweb games that begin new series frequently end up being the most interesting ones of the bunch. I'm willing to bet this answer would correlate strongly with whether you have played all SW games, or only Geneforge games.