I receive an average of one academic survey a week. I think it's a terrible shame that computer science academia has descended to the same level as the worst spammers, scraping emails and sending them unsolicited "research" emails, without a mote of personal thought/engagement.
On Tue, 2 Mar 2021 at 01:12, Tom Forbes <t...@tomforb.es> wrote: > I receive a few of these kinds of emails privately (I’m assuming they > scrape my email from git history). On one hand I think it might be > appropriate to post something like this to the developers mailing list if > it was specifically targeted to Django, and it’s definitely good to help > with research. > > On the other hand, like many of the other emails I receive this looks to > be an impersonal and auto-generated one (the bold really doesn’t help) with > a completely vague call to action: your requirement to “understand how > technical debt is managed” means nothing to me and doesn’t entice me to > spend time answering 18+ questions on a Google form for you. > > The “what’s in it for me” section is also completely meaningless - how > will answering this help me maintain the quality of Django? So to me this > is basically spam and I don’t think it’s appropriate to post here. I’m > replying publicly in case anyone else has any opinions on if this > constitutes as (academic) spam or not. > > In the hopes of being constructive I’d suggest perhaps a paragraph > explaining who you are, what the actual concrete work is that you are > doing, how our contributions can help further that and the outcomes you > want to achieve. Because right now you could replace startlingly few words > to turn this into an email about people’s thoughts on the new Pepsi flavor. > > Tom > > On Mon, 1 Mar 2021 at 23:17, Tan, J. <j....@rug.nl> wrote: > >> Dear Django contributor, >> >> We are doing research on understanding how developers manage a special >> kind of Technical Debt in *Python.* >> >> We kindly ask 15-20 minutes of your time to fill out our survey. To help >> you decide whether to fill it in, we clarify two points. >> >> “Why should I answer this survey?” >> >> Your participation is essential for us to correctly understand how >> developers manage Technical Debt. >> >> “What is in it for me?” >> >> Your valuable contributions to *Django* are part of the information we >> analyzed for this study. Thus, if you help us further by answering >> this survey, there are two immediate benefits: >> >> - you help to improve the efficiency of maintaining the quality of >> *Django*. >> - the results will be used to propose recommendations to manage >> technical debt and create tool support. >> >> Here is the link to the survey >> <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd8yKQm-2lOMTuw1Ho-7CURVCrJJc9SihLww-gty_8y7eZ2VA/viewform?usp=sf_link> >> . >> >> Thank you for your time and attention. >> >> Kind regards, >> Jie Tan, Daniel Feitosa and Paris Avgeriou >> >> Software Engineering and Architecture group <http://www.cs.rug.nl/search> >> Faculty of Science and Engineering >> University of Groningen, the Netherlands >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAJvbMuPzdbmzUtv1qC5SXdRG7yM5R3Gq70VOQivJFY69Jxz-PA%40mail.gmail.com >> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAJvbMuPzdbmzUtv1qC5SXdRG7yM5R3Gq70VOQivJFY69Jxz-PA%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> >> . >> > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAFNZOJNMA8KdBWE5uOrdKeHbWmtVGesVsUc1eXOn35kinmu92g%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAFNZOJNMA8KdBWE5uOrdKeHbWmtVGesVsUc1eXOn35kinmu92g%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- Adam -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/CAMyDDM2gzm0%3DAmUTHSP8qrTXtO%3D8-ahYVwTMDeRWkOdxdbdqJw%40mail.gmail.com.
