Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

If you really want people to do this, why do you make them copy and paste the URL into their browser? Why don't you provide a clickable link?

Here, I'll do it for you: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PT56NHC

... and now that I've gone to take the survey, I can't finish it because there is no suitable answer for question 6. Another of the questions I had trouble understanding the distinction between "None" and "0" as answers.

So I gave up.

Good surveys are really quite hard to design, and bad surveys are pretty near useless. It's pretty clear you're asking how much people will pay for something you're thinking of producing, so I suggest you think a lot harder about how you're going to get that information. I'll be very surprised if this survey gives you anything reliable.

This is really good advice and I hope the survey creator takes it. For question six specifically there's a big difference between "I only use free tools" and "I'm not interested in paying for the service described."

I was under the impression that you can't have a clickable link in a post submission (or maybe a specific type of submission).

You have to rely on someone posting a reply with a clickable link (most Show HN:'s have this format).

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To the OP, I took the survey. All the best.

Thanks for taking the survey.

I have never seen a surveymonkey URL used politely. Confirmation bias, sure, but Craigslist is quite the petri dish on this topic.

Bad surveys are often worse than useless because you leave thinking you learned something when all you got was garbage data.

Thanks for the advice. I didn't know I could post a clickable link into the original post. Thanks for the advice.

You can't put a clickable link in the submission, but you can either:

1. submit the URL itself with a brief description, then post a comment giving further information; or,

2. having submitted your "Ask HN" as you have, then post a comment with a clickable link.

Option 1 also doesn't carry the ranking penalty of a URL-less submission.

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