We recently ran a survey (thanks again to all that participated) and that did not go unnoticed. Some of our best advertisers saw this, and reached out to us because they had some questions of their own that needed answering:
- Who are you (not personally but as a group) and what do you do?
- What tools do you use?
- Do you know about us, and better yet, do you use our stuff?
The requirement for these types of surveys is that they do not bias the type of respondents one way or another, and to guarantee this the survey announcement cannot include the name of the company that’s sponsoring the research in the ad soliciting participation. The downside of this is that this may give the ads and survey a SPAM-y appearance (the advertiser will, however, be revealed at the end of the survey).
While we had some worries about this, in the end we decided that it would probably be a good thing if we as a community could help the companies that advertise on Stack Overflow create better products, and decided we would do a test run.
So if you see an ad like this (or similar) it’s not spam, but a legitimate request for help by one of our long-time advertisers:
This is a test to see if this will work for all involved. If it does, we may run more, if it doesn’t we won’t. Let us know if you have any questions or comments about this, either in the comments, on http://meta.stackoverflow.com or by emailing us at adsupport@stackoverflow.com.
PS: If you do take the survey, and find out whom the ads are for, please don’t compromise the survey's validity by sharing with everyone – kthxbai.