Sign-in functionality temporarily disabled

I've disabled the sign-in functionality for now. It wasn't working at all. It's time to thank our third-party OpenID provider for their service and move on. Since the security value of the site is so low, I'm looking at a no-password solution. Stay tuned!

Edit: It's back, but I have no idea if it'll work!

New URL for the sign-in functionality

Heads up: the URL shown when signing in has changed from appliedpc.rpxnow.com to crapycomic.rpxnow.com. In the meantime, it looks like Google has changed how it identifies its users. The end result is that you might not be able to see your history any more.

That said, only one person has ever taken the test more than once, after signing in: me. So most of you won't notice anything changing at all.

I should buy a boat.

Looks like I cracked the first page of Google UK results. I'm a contender now!

Index finally fleshed out

I started to wonder if people skipped taking the test because I didn't ever explain what was going on, so I fleshed out the placeholder index page a bit. I think it now even links to every page on the site (even the pages that are available only when logged-in), which should hopefully be helpful for users and search engines alike.

http://appliedpc.crappycomic.com/

Privacy Policy now live

It's not much, but there's a Privacy Policy page on the site now. This lets everybody know exactly what gets saved to the database and what gets shown to other users.

http://appliedpc.crappycomic.com/privacy.php

Random sampling and you

One of the potential applications I envisioned for this site was that you out there could answer questions from the point of view of a public figure. Something like, "How would Senator X answer these questions?" We could then look at the results and do fun stuff like see how people who identify as Republican perceive certain Democrats and vice versa.

One hitch with that idea is that people would likely balk at answering the full test from somebody else's point of view. I figured the solution could come with the aid of our good friend Random Sampling. By asking users to answer a subset of the full test, I'd expect a few more responses and a better sample set.

So I tried it out. I took my latest response, which was -7.38, -5.79 (even I was surprised), and took a couple random samples. By picking five random questions from the economic set, I got values of -9.02 and -3.48, for errors of 22% and 53%, respectively, which is pretty crummy. The social set fared a little better. A random sample of eleven questions got me values of -5.67 and -5.32, for errors of 2% and 8%, which is much better.

Long story short, if I ever start doing the "how would this person answer?" stuff, I could probably get away with fewer than ten or so of each type of question and call it a day.

The Applied Political Compass now supports partisan bickering!

As promised a while ago, you should now have the ability to pick a party affilition by clicking Edit Profile. Once you've done that, your test results will factor into the Party Affiliation graph on the Member Breakdown.

If your party isn't listed, please leave a comment here.