Only 274 players are actually playing according to the footer.

I'd really love to create greater awareness of vDip amongst Dip players online.

Look at that! Ambassador wants to be the vDip ambassador. :-)

One question to ask might be how many games the player is averagely playing at the same time, and if he plays more bigger (more than ten), normal, or small (four or less) maps

GOD +1

* Age
* Sex (how many women play here?)
* Country

* How long playing Diplomacy
* How frequently playing Diplomacy (ties in with GOD's question)
* How frequently playing live Diplomacy
* Do you play gunboat?
* Have you played in a game with more than 20 powers?

* Favorite five-or-more-power variants (for top 5)
* Favorite games other than Diplomacy (for top 5)
* Favorite Diplomacy sites including vDip (for top 5)
* Best setting/area/period/rules for a Diplomacy variant that hasn't been invented yet

* Best Diplomacy-related book/film/tv show/art...
* Best music to play Diplomacy to

A census taker one tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice bottle of chianti..... ffff-ffff-ffff-ffff-ffff !!

Why ask questions that could be determined from the user statistics? I would only ask qualitative questions.

Thanks guys, some great questions and points raised (including Raro's favourite McCensus happy meal)

tantrumizer, Is there an area here where user stats are tallied?

This could be interesting. Site activity does seem low here. Especially when you compare it to webdiplomacy, another site I frequent. They have a drastically lower amount of variants, but more players.

I wonder if the two sites are related?

Yes, the use the same code base. vDiplomacy uses the code originally developed as phpDiplomacy which became webDiplomacy some years back. Oli and the variant developers have just taken it to a higher level.

But it's stagnated lately due to Oli being busy and no-one else able to assist with coding.

That said in think there's a good opportunity to better promote the site to the community. Do we know if the webdiplomacy admins would be cool with a bit of cross promotion of VDip from their site (& vice versa?)

Also any members of the VDip community with a marketing/Coms/pr background that want to work with me on ideas for how to get the VDip message out?

G-man, not that I know of but someone with a copy of the db and some SQL skills could get the answers.

I prefer vdip to webdip because of some nice features it has, plus the variants. I don't think it necessarily needs more variants though. Many of them haven't really even been played that often. Definitely scope to get more webdippers over here.

I could do the SQL aggregate numbers, but I'd like to see some kind of opt out option for legal reasons. Some people may not want to be included even in the aggregate figures and we have to respect that.

I should clarify. I can write the SQL for the aggregation. I don't have access to or a copy of the DB at the present.

As someone who just spent two years working on one of the major public policy surveys, one of the first rules of survey construction is don't waste people's time asking them for information that you already have on file....unless you plan to use that as a reliability measure to judge their responses.

As an economist, I believe that what people do is a better indicator of their preferences than what they say.

So yeah, just mine the database conditional on people responding to the survey.

Thanks guys. So what next steps are needed then?