classix / artifacts / survey-plan Draft, 2026-10-04

Plan

ETC Community Survey 2026

Ethereum Classic has not had a structured community survey since a short satisfaction poll in 2019. We want to know who the community is in 2026, what it uses, what gets in its way and what it wants next, and we want enough answers for that to mean something. This page is the plan. The questions are drafts and open for comment.

Open the surveyLive in preview at survey.classix.dev. Best on a phone.
LengthAbout 10 minutes
Questions drafted, shown by role
Required fieldsNone
Open2026-10-27 to 2026-11-24
LanguagesSix, picked on the first screen
Thank-youOptional NFT for finishing
ResultsTotals and charts by 2027-01-05

What We Want to Learn

Who is here and why they stay. How people hold, mine, build on and run ETC, and which tools they rely on. What stops them doing more. Where they get news and which community spaces work. What they think ETC needs in the next year and how they see it today. The last two feed straight into the ETC brand refresh and into where infrastructure work goes.

We also want a baseline. A set of core questions is frozen, wording and order, so the 2027 survey can draw trend lines against this one.

How We Keep It Short and Easy

We read the survey methods literature and looked at how State of JS, Stack Overflow, Go, Rust, Python, EthStaker and others run theirs. The rules below come from that reading.

  1. The first screen is a language picker, preselected from the browser's language. The choice is recorded with the response, so nobody is asked which language they speak.
  2. Ten minutes for the median person, fifteen at most. People say online surveys should take 10 to 15 minutes, and completion drops once a survey passes 7 to 8. We time it on real people before launch and print the measured number on the first screen.
  3. Every question is optional, said once on the first screen. No asterisks, no "(optional)" on every label, and Next works on an empty page. Forcing answers raises dropout and does not reduce skipping.
  4. A Skip button on every question. Skips are stored apart from unanswered questions and we publish the most-skipped ones.
  5. On phones, one question per screen with big buttons and a Skip button. A single-choice answer moves on by itself after a tap, and Back always restores it. On wider screens, one section per page.
  6. A segmented progress bar, one segment per section, that counts questions rather than pages. A meta-analysis of 32 experiments found a steady bar does not reduce drop-off and a slow one increases it, while a bar that moves fast early helps. So quick one-tap questions come first and the open text comes last, which makes the bar move fast early without misleading anyone.
  7. Answers save on every page, so a partial response still counts.
  8. Mobile first. No wide grids, sliders or drag-and-drop ranking. Phones break off more than twice as often as desktops, and grids cost the most.
  9. One-click questions do most of the work. The State of JS row (heard of it, used it, plus an optional thumbs up or down) gives awareness, use and satisfaction in a click or two.
  10. Every question has a small comment button for anyone who wants to say more, so there are no separate "why" boxes. One open question closes the survey.
  11. Answer options in random order wherever the order carries no meaning. Every list has an Other box.
  12. Demographics near the end, except role and country, which come first so partial responses are usable. Every one has prefer not to say.
  13. People who finish can claim a commemorative NFT, and one of them wins 8.88 ETC in a draw, sent to the same address. Open surveys with rewards shared on social media have lost most of their responses to bots and fraud, so the NFT is claimed on a separate form at the end, and the NFT mint and the draw happen only after the survey closes and spam and low-effort entries are filtered out. A bot that fills in the survey gets nothing. The published report and an optional credit stay the main reason to take part.
  14. Answers are anonymous unless someone chooses to give an email, a wallet address or a name. Those are optional, come at the end, and are stored with the submission id, so whoever gives one can be connected to their answers. Anyone who wants to stay anonymous leaves them blank, and the survey says so plainly.

Time per Person

The survey branches on the first question. Miners see a mining section, builders and node operators see a building section, and everyone sees the rest. Estimates below assume a few seconds per click and 45 seconds per free-text box, and they get replaced by measured times after the pretest.

WhoQuestionsEstimate

The Questions

Each question carries the reason we ask it. A question nobody can name a use for gets cut, which is how the Rust survey team works. Questions marked core keep the same wording every year.

Open the surveyThe app imports this question list, so it matches what you see here.

How the heard / used row works. Each item gets three choices, never heard of it, heard of it, used it. After picking one, two optional buttons appear. For never heard or heard of it they read interested and not interested. For used it they read positive and negative experience. A "tell us more" link opens a comment box for that row alone. State of JS asks about 80 tools in 15 to 20 minutes this way.

After the Last Page

A separate form, reached from the thank-you screen and offered to everyone whether they answered anything or not. It says in plain words that giving an email connects it to the answers, and that leaving it blank keeps the response anonymous.

Above it, a second separate form takes an ETC address for the thank-you NFT, and below it a slot advertises the next ETC meetup once one is announced.

Emails are used for the boxes ticked and deleted once those are done.

Reaching People

Mining is where most of ETC's weight sits. In 640 recent blocks we sampled through our own RPC, F2Pool mined 72%, K1Pool 12% and 2Miners 9%. Much of that hashrate is Chinese-speaking, and the Chinese ETC Telegram has 245 members, so pools and hardware makers reach people that ETC social channels do not. Channels in the order we will ask them.

  1. Mining pools (F2Pool, K1Pool, 2Miners) and BITMAIN, with a dashboard notice or a post.
  2. The ETC Discord, about 12,000 members, with an announcement and a pinned link.
  3. X, through @eth_classic, @ETCCooperative, @ETCGrantsDao, @ETC_Network and our own account.
  4. Telegram, the English group and the Vietnamese, Russian, Chinese and Spanish groups.
  5. r/EthereumClassic, one post with a person answering replies.
  6. GitHub, a post in ethereumclassic Discussions and a line in client release notes.
  7. ethereumclassic.org, if its maintainers agree.
  8. Devcon 8 in Mumbai, 2026-11-03 to 2026-11-06, which falls in the middle of the window.

Every channel gets its own tagged link, so the report can show where respondents came from. A few big referrers can dominate a sample (State of JS calls it the Angular banner effect), and readers should be able to see that.

The community is split over the Olympia treasury proposal. Sharing the survey through one camp's channels would skew it, so we will ask people on every side of that debate to share it, and the tagged links will show if one side dominates.

We post four times across the window, each with a new angle. Launch, an early look at a few numbers, a halfway count and a last call. Each reminder adds responses and the gains flatten after three or four.

Languages

The survey opens on a language picker, preselected from the browser's language, and the language is stored with every response. That replaces a question about language preference and lets us compare answers across language groups.

We launch in English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese and Portuguese. Chinese matters most, because mining is ETC's Chinese-speaking core, and the others match the active ETC Telegram groups and the largest locales on ethereumclassic.org. Machine translation is a first draft, never the final text. Each language gets a native reviewer from the ETC community, and every translation maps to one English question ID so the data stays one dataset. A partly translated survey does worse than none, State of JS saw completion fall to 13% in one, so a language ships complete or it waits for 2027.

Tooling

Self-hosted Formbricks Community Edition, AGPL. It gives one question per card, saved partial responses with drop-off per question, branching, hidden fields for the source tag, and one survey in many languages with a single dataset, with no response limits and nothing loaded from Google. Google Forms, Typeform and Tally are out because they cannot be self-hosted and Google does not load in mainland China. LimeSurvey is the fallback.

Spam defence without logins. A self-hosted proof-of-work check (ALTCHA) rather than reCAPTCHA or Turnstile, both of which fail in mainland China. Rate limits at the proxy, a honeypot field and a minimum-time check. Suspect responses get flagged and reported separately, never silently dropped.

Privacy

A short notice above the first question says who runs the survey, why, the legal basis, how long data is kept, who processes it and how to reach us, with a link to the full text. IP addresses are not stored past the spam checks. No analytics or third-party cookies on the survey pages. Free-text boxes carry a note not to include personal details. The notice gets a legal review before launch.

Publishing the Results

A public results page within six weeks of close, built on the State of JS model. Every chart shows its sample size, small groups under ten get merged, and comments sit next to the chart they belong to. A methods box at the top gives field dates, channels, starts, completions and the partial rule, and says plainly that this is an opt-in sample with no margin of error. People who care about ETC most are the most likely to answer, and the report will say so.

Alongside it we release the full questionnaire and a section on what we are changing because of the answers. Individual responses stay private, so there is no per-response dataset. Showing people that their answers went somewhere is the case for them coming back in 2027.

We also check the sample against what we can measure. The pool split among respondents gets compared with on-chain pool shares, and the client split with the node counts on etcnodes.org.

Timeline

2026-10-04 to 2026-10-11Draft questions open for comment
2026-10-12 to 2026-10-18Pretest with 5 to 10 people, a miner and a non-English speaker among them, thinking aloud. Measure the real time.
2026-10-19 to 2026-10-25Build in Formbricks, translations and native review, privacy notice
2026-10-27Survey opens
2026-11-03Second post, an early look, as Devcon opens
2026-11-10Halfway count
2026-11-21Last call
2026-11-24Survey closes
By 2027-01-05Results page, questionnaire and data published

Open Decisions

  1. Olympia and other contested proposals. The draft asks how informed people feel and how much they know, and stops there. ETC Cooperative's 2021 treasury polls showed 74% in favour across 1,274 votes, and the proposal behind them (ECIP-1098) was later withdrawn. An opt-in poll cannot settle a contested proposal. Whether to ask for opinions at all is a call for the team.
  2. The NFT. Non-transferable or transferable, who pays the mint, and the artwork. Non-transferable takes the resale value out of farming it.
  3. Optional wallet proof, separate from the NFT. A last step where a wallet signs a free message, so we can label a response as holder or miner without keeping the address. It needs a small service of our own and does not stop one person using several addresses. Proposed for 2027, not this year.
  4. The item lists for wallets, apps, pools and tools. They need checking against what is live in October.
  5. Whether to publish the draft as a GitHub issue for community comment before the pretest, the way Rust and State of JS do.

Sources