h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Traveller in Time about the pop in
"I only had it once, so far the cookie it sets seems to work at my side "

Wonder if its more to do with IP address rather than cookies...

If you've a fixed IP you'd only get the questionnaire once, but if you've an IP that changes daily/each time you connect to the web, you might get it every time your address changes.


I finally got the popup... Couldn't get the questionnaire to load for ages... Left the window open all weekend, came back this morning and it worked... Only for the questionnaire to tell me they didn't want my opinions because I didn't live in the UK after three questions

Whisky, if you had read the backlog here, you'd have known that you shouldn't admit that you lived outside the UK

Backlog? What's a backlog?

I got it once by resetting my cookies and logging out and back in about twenty times, at which point I told it I lived in the 'wrong' place.

Then I got it again when my browser unexpectedly reset all of its settings (I lost all my bookmarks!) and was able to tell it I lived in England and fill it in properly.

Thanks for all of your comments about how this survey is (or rather, isn't) working, everybody - we'll pass them on to the department who set up the survey in order to give them a thorough context of the experiences of h2g2's users. Anybody got any other experiences they feel they should let us know about - people who have had the survey just once, for example?

P

It keeps coming now I've done it - I'm on a school network that doesn't accept cookies.

I tried to feed it a sandwich yesterdy - it didn't like that, either.

I haven't had the damn thing at all, and I log in and out every day.

I got the survey on my home 'puter this weekend but when I clicked on the continue bit on the first window I got a dialogue box saying "The document contains no data."

That's a new one.

Well, I've had the survey just once. It worked, bar the aforementioned problem with the text being the same colour as the background.

Firefox seems to serve up 'The document contains no data' every once in a while, even when the document clearly _does_ contain data... Maybe someone around here can shed some light.

So what happens with the information gleaned from those questionnaires which were successfully completed? It presumably has something to do with financing, staffing, etc. Will we get to see any changes as a result, or was it just another way to fritter away some of the licence-fee payers' money?

PS - I didn't get one at all this time round; live outside UK anyway.

Are there any official statistics as to how many researchers live in the UK and elsewhere?

Yes, it's very tempting to think that the questionnaire was specificially designed to waste everybody's time and to spend as much of the licence fee as was physically possible on stuff nobody wanted at all. For our next trick, we're going to be recycling fresh £50 notes for Christmas Decorations all the way around the office...


Well, the real reason for the survey is because it's always quite difficult to get qualitative feedback on how our users are finding our online services. Just like the way in which TV and radio assess whether people enjoy listening to/watching programmes via surveys, so we have to do the same thing too. No point spending money keeping websites open that nobody likes...

No point spending money keeping websites open that nobody likes...

Or on surveys that don't work....

I didn't have any problem with it at all & it came up soon after the notification was posted.

However, I actually purposely logged on for a change - I have 'h2 my page' listed on "my favourites" (Internet explorer), this I listed once after I had logged on. Therefore whenever I 'click' on this favourite () I go straight to my home page & seem to be already logged on. If you see what I mean!!

So I suppose since then I wouldn't have had any more or at least seen any more of the questionnaire or maybe I am just lucky!!

Question: as the, ahem, hamsters obviously have, somewhere, all our email addresses, then couldn't they just have posted at random to all our email addresses? Or is that too simple?

I got it once, did it once, and haven't been troubled since.

>> No point spending money keeping websites open that nobody likes... <<


While it would be easy to dismiss such a truism as 'painfully obvious' it does raise the unlikely question that somebody 'over there' actually considered the possibility. What kind of mind could even formulate the hypothesis that 'nobody' likes h2g2?

How could anyone even think that? Is it not equally obvious that hundreds, yay, thousands of us are here, have been here for years, and wouldn't know what to do if we lost h2g2? There are blood sweat and tears on these pages.

Personally I never again want to experience the hopeless disorder and cosmic confusion that came over my life during the Great Vogon Detour (aka 'Rupert)) of Jan-Mar 2001. H2g2 is the closest thing to a religion I have ever had. Thoughts that it might have no value are incomprehensible and downright blasphemous.

peace
~jwf~

<>

Well, then they wouldn't be able to reach the people who haven't signed up yet - there are probably people out there who lurk but haven't registered, and people who are coming to the site for the first time.

Do you really expect people who come to the site for the firts time to answer this very specific questionnaire ?

I don't know. I would; I love filling in questionnaires. But I'm weird that way.