that this question was related to one.
Apparently it's related to two - your two General Discussion threads about personal UFO sightings on April 23, two days before you posted this.Community Help thread:
https://democraticunderground.com/100217852064
https://democraticunderground.com/100217853696
You said this in the second OP:
Statistically speaking DU represents a very small sampling. For such a small group, the number of people that responded I thought was quite large. I think that it shows just how common sightings are. As they say, where there is smoke there is fire. There is something going on in our skies and oceans.
You are NOT going to be able to draw any conclusions as to how common UFO sightings are by doing what you did, even if you knew how many active, regular users DU has (which is proprietary information and only the admins' business anyway).
If you look at the number of views your threads got, the total was several thousand. A lot of those are duplicates, since every time someone looks at a thread it's counted as another view, no matter how many times they looked at it previously. But even cutting that view count in half, it's thousands of views. The messages from DUers about UFO sightings would be just a tiny, tiny percentage of that.
And that's even though your referring to UFOs in the thread titles meant you had a self-selecting group of readers particularly interested in UFOs and much more likely to say they've had such experiences than DUers in general.
All DU polls suffer from the same problem. But at least if something is set up as a poll, people will know they can vote for various options, and you're more likely to get some idea of what percentage of DUers have had such experiences.
If they bother to vote in your poll. If they see it at all. Both of which are big IFs.
Asking people in this forum, which gets very little traffic compared to GD, how much they use DU will never get you any real idea of how many active, regular users DU has, let alone how common UFO experiences are.
You'd have to poll all the users.
I'm sure EarlG could email everyone registered here, simultaneously, since I had that admin option when I used vBulletin board software.
I can't imagine him using it for anything that wasn't a real emergency, though.
And I can imagine the sort of responses he'd get if he used that admin option to ask how many DUers had personal UFO sightings...
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