An Unwelcome Intrusion? Player Responses to Survey Research Recruitment on the World of Warcraft Forums
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Internet discussion forums provide convenient opportunities to recruit survey participants, but how do the everyday users of these sites feel about such research requests? Using the official forums of the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft (WoW) as a site of inquiry, this article investigates interactions between researchers and potential research participants. Using WoW, a frequently researched gaming community as a case study, I discuss player reactions to the 163 survey requests posted to the WoW forums between December 2010 and April 2015. In particular I outline the concerns raised by forum participants (including fears of account theft and critiques of survey design) and provide evidence this particular online community is suffering from survey fatigue. After highlighting these points of tension between players and researchers, I conclude with a set of suggested best practices for future interactions with this particular online community.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it