[MoS] Rank the eWorld - Revised

Day 2,185, 14:04 Published in Ireland Ireland by MrConway




Minister of Community, Office of Census and Statistics

First off I'd like to apologize over the last Rank The eWorld survey. I am only new to the software I am using and made a bit of a hiccup with the survey. Thanks and apologies to those who actually took the time to fill in the survey. Anyway I've played around with the tool I use and have found an easier way for both you and me to record and analyze the data!

All you need to do is drag the countries you want an MPP with into the "Sign MPP" box and the countries you don't want an MPP with into the "Don't Sign MPP" box. You decide how many countries you want to put into each box, you can choose whatever countries you want, the power is in your hands!



ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Anonymity:

In order to help prevent fraud and abuse, I require that all survey-takers provide a link to their eRepublik profile. Because I can personally see how you responded to specific questions if I really wanted to, this means that responses to this survey are not technically anonymous. I do, however, guarantee that such identifying information will never be seen by anybody but myself. I will never publicize or share anybody’s participation in this survey, much less their answers to specific questions. If I enlist someone’s help in analyzing data, they will only ever see data that has been purged of personally-identifying information. Thus, it is my hope that survey-takers feel comfortable in the knowledge that they will never be harassed regarding their participation in this survey, and that their answers will never be used against them politically.



Survey program:

Rather than using a simple Google form, this survey makes use of a more professional-quality survey program called Qualtrics. The advantages of this program are a more flexible user interface, better analytics, and, most importantly, better security and fraud prevention (see below). More information about the program can be found here.



Fraud Prevention

One important security feature of this program is that it does not allow anyone (including myself) to alter data that has already been collected. The only way to alter existing data is to delete or filter-out someone’s entire response set. However, because I now require people to provide a unique personal identification number (PIN) along with their profile links, survey-takers can be 100% certain that their responses were counted in full in any report by the software in which they can verify the presence of their PIN.

Participants can also be reasonably certain that results of these surveys are not influenced in other ways, such as adding fraudulent responses on top of legitimate data. The detection of multi votes can never be 100% accurate, but the vast majority of multi attempts can be detected using the fraud prevention tools that are imbedded within this software along with and a little common sense. For starters, the program collects metadata on things like IP addresses, screen resolution, and browser/flash/OS versions that I can (and do) check to make sure people aren’t taking this survey more than one time from the same computer. I also check to make sure that no two answer sets are suspiciously similar to one another, especially if one survey has been started within a minute or two of the other survey being finished. Profile links that are collected are thoroughly checked for suspicious properties, such as the use of duplicate profile links or profile links of dead citizens. Finally, verification checks are made via PM for a randomly-selected handful of profile links to ensure that people who took the survey actually are who they say they are. In the future I would also like to start cross-checking profile links with names of suspected Irish multi-accounts. If you have such a list, or know where to find one, please let me know ASAP. However, even without such a list, the tools and procedures outlined above already give me a significant degree of confidence in the validity of my data. If multi abuse exists at all it is extremely rare, and its final effect on results is negligible.



Thank you for in advance for taking this survey!

Minister of Community, Census and Statistics

MrConway



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