[mmehl]

Hello,

for my Master’s dissertation in “Business with Consumer Psychology” at Bangor University (UK) I am currently researching online community members’ word-of-mouth behaviour, i.e. if/how they promote the brand “Apple” outside their online community.

For this I chose online communities centred on Apple, such as MacNN Forums because Apple users are known for being enthusiastic and highly interconnected users, with a strong connection with the brand. The aim of my research is a better understanding of participation and identification of users within the online community and to gain insights into the intention to recommend the brand.

For this I need YOUR help…

Please take 2-3 minutes to complete the following very short questionnaire, by which you would greatly help me with my dissertation. Further information on the study can be found there, too.

https://bangorbusiness.qualtrics.com...5QRtAsxU5VqE2E

Of course all responses are kept anonymous and as this is not a commercial research they are not given to a third party. If you are interested however, I would gladly post the main findings of this study once it is completed.

Should you have any questions about this survey, please contact Miriam Mehl at Bangor University: Bangor.Survey aatt gmx . de

I would like to thank the Forums Administrator reader50 for allowing me to post this link here.

Thank you very much for your help!

mmehl

[subego]

Originally Posted by Miriam Mehl

Thank you for taking part in this study and helping me with my dissertation.

You're welcome.

[imitchellg5]

Done.

[jmiddel]

Done also.

[angelmb]

Pleasure.

[reader50]

As stated, mmehl cleared it with us before posting. Everything looks legit.

mmehl, I edited your post to make your email less machine-readable. Bots regularly scrape any public forum to harvest email addresses. The addresses are then sold to spammers.

We are actually using their tactics against them.

[iMOTOR]

Yeah, bots aren’t stupid either; they know that when a word comes before ‘at’ followed by a domain name, it’s a human trying to obfuscate an email address. It doesn’t mind picking the string up anyway and parsing an @ in place of ‘at.’

[Mrjinglesusa]

Done.

[subego]

Originally Posted by iMOTOR 

Yeah, bots aren’t stupid either; they know that when a word comes before ‘at’ followed by a domain name, it’s a human trying to obfuscate an email address. It doesn’t mind picking the string up anyway and parsing an @ in place of ‘at.’

How often do they bother? Isn't there enough lower hanging fruit?

[turtle777]

Looky looky who's back - in the title

The &&& issue from hell.

-t

[Uncle Skeleton]

Should have been a poll

[The Final Dakar]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Looky looky who's back - in the title

The &&& issue from hell.

-t

It's not back, else this would be borked too.

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally Posted by The Final Dakar 

It's not back, else this would be borked too.

Only if it was edited since the return of the bug. The bug only happens when you "touch" the post.

[The Final Dakar]

Originally Posted by Uncle Skeleton 

Only if it was edited since the return of the bug. The bug only happens when you "touch" the post.

The title was edited this morning.

[P]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Looky looky who's back - in the title

The &&& issue from hell.

-t

The issue isn't gone, it's just hidden. There is a hack that hides the issue, and in normal cases, you should never encounter it as a user. That was a special case - apparently brought on by editing the OP to obfuscate the email.

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally Posted by The Final Dakar 

The title was edited this morning.

Why is there no timestamp for the edit?

[The Final Dakar]

I don't know how this place works.

[subego]

As I just learned, the current setup doesn't timestamp title changes.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by iMOTOR 

Yeah, bots aren’t stupid either; they know that when a word comes before ‘at’ followed by a domain name, it’s a human trying to obfuscate an email address. It doesn’t mind picking the string up anyway and parsing an @ in place of ‘at.’

I like to add weird diacriticals. Instead of "at", put something like "ả†". Still readable enough for humans to parse, but should at least throw off the less sophisticated spambots.

Another thing that might help would be to riddle it with zero-width spaces, Unicode 0x200b.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by iMOTOR 

Yeah, bots aren’t stupid either; they know that when a word comes before ‘at’ followed by a domain name, it’s a human trying to obfuscate an email address. It doesn’t mind picking the string up anyway and parsing an @ in place of ‘at.’

LOL, yeah, does anyone really think Skynet is THAT stupid ?

-t

[reader50]

Ok wiseguys, I've increased the cleverness.

[iMOTOR]

FWIW, I have mailto links on several websites, and I get maybe 2-3 spam msgs per week in any given account, and 99% of the time, those msgs automatically go to the Mac Mail junk folder. It really comes down to the quality of your spam filtering.

[mmehl]

Originally Posted by reader50 

I edited your post to make your email less machine-readable. Bots regularly scrape any public forum to harvest email addresses. The addresses are then sold to spammers.[/url].

Thank you, that was very thoughtful of you !

And thank you to everyone who was / is so kind, as to fill in the questionnaire, you're a great help for my dissertation.

[SSharon]

Just took the survey, not even 2 minutes to complete it. Will you be posting any of your results here once you gather enough responses?

[subego]

Yes please!

[mmehl]

Thanks for filling it in
I'll have finished the dissertation in September (which seems a pretty long time, but I'll probably need it) and will post a summary of my results then. I'm glad you're interested in my research
cheers mmehl

[andi*pandi]

I appreciate that your survey was more succinct than others we've seen. Good luck!

[brassplayersrock²]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I like to add weird diacriticals. Instead of "at", put something like "ả†". Still readable enough for humans to parse, but should at least throw off the less sophisticated spambots.

Another thing that might help would be to riddle it with zero-width spaces, Unicode 0x200b.

I used to do this until a couple of people started complaining about their e-mails to me being bounced back.

[turtle777]

You must know some pretty smart people

-t

[brassplayersrock²]

*sighs* You don't even know the half of it!

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

I appreciate that your survey was more succinct than others we've seen. Good luck!

I agree!

There's generally a handful of questions that make me go, "umm. wha i guess", at which point I usually just stop.

If somebody isn't going to spend the time to figure out what s/he wants to ask, it's certainly not worth MY time to wade through vague bullshit and consequently generate inconclusive answers to help someone figure out — should they have the presence of mine to properly analyse their data — that they didn't do their homework.

This, however, was good.

[iM@k]

Pssst. Over here.

The answers are

1. C
2. B
3. B
4. A
5. D
6. A
7. Tsa Tsa Gabor
8. C
9. D
10. Threve
11. A
12. B
13. B
14. Wombat Lactations
15. D
16. D
17. C
18. Z
19. 0 with line through like O in a Nordic country
20. C

[mmehl]

Originally Posted by andi*pandi 

I appreciate that your survey was more succinct than others we've seen. Good luck!

I aim to please It's the first time I'm conducting primary research so I'm glad it's going so well

[SSharon]

Originally Posted by mmehl 

I aim to please It's the first time I'm conducting primary research so I'm glad it's going so well

Do you have a lot of responses from here? Have you posted this on other Mac message boards?

[mmehl]

I don't / can't track where the responses come from, so I wouldn't be able to say how many responses are from this community. I did however post the link on several other forums as well, which is necessary to get a representative and valid sample, and in turn representative results. I only used very well known and active communities /forums to post the link, using “Alexa” (a website which ranks other websites) to determine which ones I would contact.

Overall, I had some very pleasant experiences with this and other forums, with both members and administrators being extremely supportive / helpful. Being a newbie in this, it really brought a smile to my face.

[reader50]

You could have created several identical surveys, so that each forum got a different link. Then you could separate the results. This would also let you detect and ignore bogus results, if one of the forums passed their link around to their drunk friends.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by reader50 

This would also let you detect and ignore bogus results, if one of the forums passed their link around to their drunk friends.

Huh ?

I thought ALL forums did that

*shrug*

-t

[SSharon]

Originally Posted by reader50 

You could have created several identical surveys, so that each forum got a different link. Then you could separate the results. This would also let you detect and ignore bogus results, if one of the forums passed their link around to their drunk friends.

I figured they would know the source based on the referrer when we click the link.

[mmehl]

Originally Posted by reader50 

This would also let you detect and ignore bogus results, if one of the forums passed their link around to their drunk friends.

Weeeell, in that case let's hope no one did ...

I guess I could have done separate surveys and then integrated the results (which I already did, as there is a German version currently out there). As it is the survey software only shows when the questionnaire was filled in etc. If I had used it to email the link to people it would have been able to tell who hadn’t responded yet, allowing you to remind them of the survey. I’m not sure how that is “completely anonymous”, but it’s quite clever.
--> Oh, and for the bogus results, before analysing the data, it gets "cleaned". So hopefully I would find the drunk participants, so they don't mess up the results.

[mmehl]

Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill in my questionnaire, the data collection is now complete. You were a great help and I’m looking forward to the results.
I’ll be posting a summary of the findings in September, as some of you were interested in the results

[Doofy]

Bangor has a university? Really?