What is your BEST month of sales during the 2nd half of the year?

Not to jump on you too hard, but I'm not so sure this is the type of topic worthy of a poll, much less 4 polls. It seems to me the answers to this aren't so valuable for the shareware market. I would think sales tend to be more flat (or steadily climbing) for shareware year round. There may be some seasonal variations (maybe a few more sales for christmas, a few less sales in summer when everyone's having fun away from their computer) but I wouldn't expect it to be very significant for most people.

(If El Moderator cleaned this up to one thread, maybe we could just have a general discussion about seasonal variation?)

Or better yet, use the search feature :D

http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=447&highlight=summer

T'is the season to hate polls fralalalalalalala.

I guess my rant was lost with the hdd crash but this is exactly the reason why I think Polls should be closed. Hardly if any are really useful and people just tend to abuse them over and over again.

I think that the only one that should be able to start a Poll is the moderator(s).

If somebody want to start a Poll, they should send a PM to a moderator with their Poll-suggestion and an explanation to why they think that their poll would be useful. Then the moderator could decide if he thought it was a good idea or not.

If this is not a viable option, then I agree with Akura that polls should be closed.

Sorry, a little O/T, but:

IMO, if you don't like polls, don't want to vote, or you don't trust the results, then just don't read the polls. They're cleared marked as polls on the View Threads page of this forum. I do agree that 4 seem a little exsessive, but they are hardly a problem.

~Hanford

I do agree that four poll threads is pretty annoying. Anytime anyone votes on one, the thread moves to the top of the list. With four polls of relatively low importance or use and a good long title, it simply makes things feel needlessly cluttered. Finally, as a forum it seems to make sense that polls should be a suppliment to a thread-worthy topic, and none of these four polls are worthy of any discussion outside their inappropriateness. They are purely statistical and are pretty useless as individual questions and only start to gain meaning if they are all taken together.

But on a more constructive note, addressed to TJM:
This kind of poll should be conducted more on a private scale using email and such, like the poll that DavidRM did a while back where he set up a webpage and posted the link to it on several forums. Then you can go the whole nine yards by adding a few more questions which could allow you to actually construct a graph of meaningful data concerning genres and sales at different times of the year perhaps. Or, if nothing else, it gives you the ability to publish the findings as one complete set of information rather than four separate moving polls.

- Air

I originally wanted to make the four polls into one poll, but because of the limitations of the poll generator on this message board of only allowing a 10 item list, I was unable to do so since there are 12 months in a year. Since polls were allowed on this message board and I had seen other polls, I did not think there would be objections to them.

On the subject of statistics, every business uses statistics, even small businesses. We have been in business for many years, but I’ve never seen stats on the monthly sales of shareware. Seasonal information is interesting but not specific. Guesses are interesting but inaccurate.

But overall, as far as the content of a poll is concerned, it seems irrelevant. If everyone who posted a post was criticized for their topic selection, the number of posts would go down tremendously except for people who enjoy participating in flaming. It would seem if you do not like the content of a post or poll, you have the choice to ignore it. Then the post would drift off the message board very quickly since there would be no interest in it. But if you reply to the post or poll that you are not interested in, it sends it up to the top thereby giving it attention.

From the messages that have been posted here, there may be an interest in a post on the topic of polls on message boards. But I’m not going to start the post because I have no interest in that subject.

I'll apologize for starting the replies off on the wrong foot. Like I said, I didn't want to jump on you too hard, and I guess I worded things wrong. I was basically complaining about the fact that you spread this across 4 polls. It just seemed a little cluttered to me (because they occupy space, and continually jump to the top). I didn't really mean to say or imply that you shouldn't be allowed to ask questions that interest you, so I apologize if thats what you took out of my post.

What I was really thinking when I said it wasn't "worthy of a poll" is that putting this in poll format doesn't necessarily provide much in the way of useful answers. This type of thing is probably better discussed in general as there would probably be more to it than simple months. Personally, I see little in the way of monthly peaks, and I expected that to be the norm for most people. Where I thought this discussion would be more useful would be focusing on other topics, like "I get a spike 15 days after a promotion" or something along those lines.

So again, I apologize for aiming this thread in the wrong direction. Let's try to get back on topic and address TJM's question of where do you see variations in sales.