Every so often we get requests from people to do a survey on this sub. We universally decline these requests, but most of them are good actors in at least they ask permission and then honor our wishes. Sometimes I point out that I’m doing them a favor, since this is about the last place you want to do a survey—admit it, most of us would give random answers just to troll them. Shitty surveys amount to shitty science, and we all know that surveys themselves are already the ghetto of science.

Now this assumes we are dealing with good actors. Rest assured there is an army of people that would go to great lengths to do whatever they can to make each and every one of us personally miserable. Therefore we have to assume any attempt to collect personal data, even seemingly anonymous data, is an attempt to dox us. So good science or bad science or good intentions or bad intentions, all surveys are banned from the sub. No exceptions.

Now this leads us to our current problem with vermin. There is someone claiming to be from UCSB doing a survey about the people of TRP. Are they? Don’t care. They know very well we will refuse their request and ban their account, so they have taken to PMing people directly. They have been using multiple accounts (which I will be discussing with the admins).

We strongly recommend you completely ignore these PMs. Do not even click the link to see where it takes you. The links themselves are all uniquely identifiable. At a bare minimum you are associating your username with an IP to someone outside of reddit. This itself may be relatively benign, but every dox’ing starts with a seed of information. Don’t give it to them.