Hey there,
I appreciate the concern, but are you sure about this? In the form OP mentions an e-mail that belongs to a university, and the form itself asks only game-dev questions, and doesn’t ask a single personal question.
Of course it’s always good to be wary when interacting with strangers, but was wondering if you’ve noticed anything I might have missed?
Hi, if there’s anything I can do to help confirm this is a student research project please let me know. If there’s way to privately message it, I could send a picture of my student ID to a mod? (Or even my dissertation notes/outline? I don't think scams generally include a few months worth of literature review.)
As you mentioned, the survey doesn't ask any personal questions or collect identifying data.
it lines up with common scams
1) The author is hiding, the email in google forms is randomnumbers@mytudubin.ie while the website teachers do not list mytudubin.ie domain: https://www.tudublin.ie/connect/staff-directory/
It could be that the student get different domain emails but i am unable to confirm.
2) The original url is forms.gle but it redirects to doc.google
3) I am sure anyone doing survey wont ask randomly, the data will be too random even if the author believes to be truth the data isn't going to be correct. Too many basic questions that anyone can answer and too many can be answered in different ways. Now that it is on public, anyone and everyone will answer either truthfully or falsely.
I see what you mean, but mytudublin.ie uses the DNS servers of TU Dublin, according to the whois database. Also I'm pretty sure docs.google.com belongs to Google. Sure, anyone can make a poll on Google, but it's not exactly some dubious other website. And the quality of the survey / results is another story. Rest assured that if it was asking for any personal information, like surveys from high profile sources often do, I'd have closed the tab instantly and never returned.
I understand the worry about scam surveys, hopefully I can clear up some of your concerns:
1) Students do get different domain emails than staff and the random numbers in the email address is my student number. (I’d much rather they used our names but that’s just the way the university assigned emails are.) It says as much on the TU Dublin website in a few places:
https://www.tudublin.ie/for-students/student-login/city-centre/
https://www.tudublin.ie/emailproject/students/
2) When you send a link to a Google survey, it gives you the option to shorten the URL. The (very long) original URL is docs.google but when you shorten it, it becomes forms.gle . You can check this yourself if you have a google account.
3) Posting a survey online like this does of course mean people can answer falsely or inaccurately, it’s one of the major downsides of anonymous surveys! But this method does also have its strengths and isn’t too uncommon for research like mine, and this isn't the only research method I'm using for the project. Either way, that does seem more a question about the validity of my results than whether the survey is a scam.
I’m not sure what you mean about the topic of the project, I do explain exactly what the research project is in the first line of the blurb at the top of the form?
I’m also uncertain quite how big an issue this is – you’re the first to raise these sort of concerns and I’ve posted this in a lot of places and gotten a fair amount of respondents by now – but I suppose it’s good to play it safe! I’ll take it into account if there’s a next time, thank you.
