This past month, UBBDev conducted a User Survey to gain a pulse on our community and see where would could make improvements in order to better serve you. It also gave us the opportunity to test out the features of the Polling Implementation in the UBB, as well as editing the polling templates and adding the Pretty up the Poll hack.

This article will discuss some of the results, although you can probably come up with the same conclusions on your own.

The first group of questions focused on UBBDev user demographics. In general we found that the majority of our users would fall in the teen/twenty-something category. There was a good number of "older" UBBDev'ers, aged 30+. Nearly all of the members replying to the survey came from either North America or Europe. In hindsight it would have been beneficial to ask what each member's native language was, in order to determine whether there was an opportunity to add a support forum for another language in addition to our current German, French and Spanish forums.

The majority of our members tend to be experienced UBB'ers. Only 8% of the respondents have been using their UBB™ for less than 1 year, an indication that we are dealing with an experienced user community. They know the product and are looking for ways to extend its use and functionality. 60% of our respondents have used their UBB™ for more than 2 years.

Their boards are used for a variety of functions, and most tend to be smaller sites, although there were quite a number of large boards as well. Most respondents have been keeping up with newer versions, although there are still a number of "old timers" using older versions of UBB™. For us this is an indication of the need for us to continue our efforts in supporting modifications for all versions of UBB™, old and new, and to continue efforts to try to port old hacks to new versions. However, 70% of the community is using the most recent stable and/or developmental versions.

There is a wide range of hacks installed on member boards, as well as their organization in terms of number of forums. Surprisingly, the number of hacks installed skewed toward the tails, with either a large number of hacks installed, or few. There may be a correlation between this and the version being used. Members using the stable version of UBB™ may have many modifications installed, while those running a beta version may have few.

The second part of the survey focused on UBBDev and the services we provide to the users. Most users visit UBBDev for a variety of reasons, particilarly for hacks, conversation and support. Only 38% of the respondents indicated that they come to UBBDev for Graphics/Templates, and indication that we can do a better job in meeting your eye-candy needs. As such, this is one area that we will try to improve upon, so keep an eye out for a re-organization and re-design of our graphics database, as well as additional tutorials and guides to assist you in jazzing up your UBB™.

Most respondents are using the tried and true methods of implementing hacks using a File Editor. Although a growing number are using various auto-installs. For UBBDev this means that we will continue to focus on documentation standards to ensure that modifications are easy to implement, as well as continue our commitment to making hacks available via multihack or other install programs. A large group of the respondents (40%) indicate that they re-write the code on their own. For UBBDev, this means we should encourage coders to share their development and actively release their modifications.

Overall people seem to be pleased with the service provided by the staff at UBBDev. We do make an effort to try to respond to all questions, but occasionally a few slip through the cracks. With improvements to the search function, members should be able to check older threads for questions that may have already been asked and answered. Over 75% of the respondent rated UBBDev at least Very Good. As a reminder, please use the Suggestions Forum to indicate any areas where you feel we can improve.

There was a fairly even distribution of responses for our U-Zine. Some read all of the articles and interviews, while nearly an equal amount don't read it at all. For those of you who don't read the U-Zine (and as a result probably aren't reading this article), we'd like to hear ways we can improve the U-Zine to make it more usable and valuable for you. We recently announced that we are open to contributions from members, but so far nobody has taken us up on that offer. If you have some ideas, we'd love to hear them.

Finally, we asked what version browser you use. The majority of the respondents are using Internet Explorer, which comes as no surprise. However, there are a significant number of users who are using other browsers as well. For UBBDev, this reaffirms our commitment toward implementation of standards such as XHTML Transitional templates and CSS Standards so that UBBDev renders properly for all.

With that said, we would like to thank each of you for taking the time out to respond to the poll. We will likely conduction another poll in several months to see where we have made improvements.

Now for the moment you've been waiting for...the door-prize! The winner of our prize...an Official Infopop Mousepad is ... (drum roll, please), BlueWave ...congratulations and thanks for your entry. Please contact us to arrange delivery of this great collectors item!