Creating Statistics on this forum ?

[Pashalis]

is there a place here where you can create statistics ?

I thought it might be interesting to create statistics from the expieriences of people here.
for example how many are on the anti gluten,milk,sugar or the paleo diet? did they lose weight and if so how much, for how long are they doing the diet  etc....

I could think of a lot of Topics where we could create stats to see more or less objectively (statistically) what progress people made here and what effect it had taken together on them.

of course honesty about our experiences would be important for the stats to be more objective.

another thing that would be important is the way the statistic is set up as to be as objective as possible.
for example how the questions are written etc.

this could provide for example writers like Laura more solid backup of the the things we discuss and practise here.

like :
"we have 200 continuously active forum members who are on the Paleo diet (à la "Cassiopaea forum"), 70 % of them reported a significant weight loss of more then 10kg, 20% reported a weight loss of more then 20 kg and so on. 5% reported little - no weight loss ......"

I don't know how accurate the results would be scientificly/statisticly but we sure have a bunch of people together here who are much more critical and objective as the average citizen ! So stats could be interesting ?!

I'm not sure...
what do you think ?

[Megan]

The forum software can do simple polls, but the feature does not appear to be enabled for regular users (otherwise there would be a "New Poll" button next to "New Topic"). Maybe there is a history to that -- I don't know. I have used them on other SMF forums and the results can be interesting if not scientific.

A poll is a topic with a multiple-choice question attached. The first post of the topic contains the question and choices in addition to the opening post of the topic, and the replies are ordinary topic replies. There are options for how many votes per user, how long the poll stays open, whether users can change their votes, and whether the results are visible (no/yes before voting/yes after voting).

[luc]

[...]is there a place here where you can create statistics ? [...]

If I understand your idea correctly, I'd suggest online survey tools for this purpose - I worked with SurveyMonkey once in my job (_http://www.surveymonkey.com/). You can basically create an online survey with different types of questions (multiple choice, free text etc.) that people can fill out, and you can then export the results as graphics/excel/pdf. But the free version wouldn't be enough I guess... A quick google gave me this free thing: _http://freeonlinesurveys.com/ - don't know if it's any good though.

Generally, I think a relatively detailed online survey with an intelligent set of questions would be a good way to get some very interesting statistics about the progress of forum members (if answered honestly). Maybe even interesting collerations will pop up that wouldn't be visible without the statistical approach. It could be done for different topics as well... fwiw

[Megan]

The original question was "is there a place here where you can create statistics" and the answer is yes, potentially (but probably not currently), assuming statistics = surveys/polls. There are various external solutions that can be used as well, and that are both more private and more flexible than Survey Monkey, but it is a little early to be looking for tools when not much interest has been shown thus far in collecting and analyzing such data, gauged by the response to this topic. That could change.

In a sense, every topic if not every post here is a survey of sorts, although we generally use our "system 1s" to analyze the data, which is to say we don't look all that closely and it would be easy to miss things.

[Sirius]

There was once briefly asked for: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=10662.0
But the thread is rather old.

IMO, such things as polls, if they were enabled, should be managed by moderators carefully here and permission to create polls should not be given to any user (like in ordinary forums).

[Pashalis]

thanks for the link Sirius !

hmmm SOTT polls are also an interesting Idea.

[Sirius]

You have to consider that anonymous polls are more subjet to fake votes since unregistered visitors may change their IPs or reset cookies, etc.

[Data]

A similar call to get statistical feedback was made some time ago in the Life without Bread thread:

http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,22916.msg338940.html#msg338940