survey tool

colak · 2009-06-15 08:59:29

Can anybody suggest a good web survey tool? I found LimeSurvey but it seems to be bloatware at 45Mbs. I know that there used to be a number of plugins but they are no longer available or supported so an independent tool should work just fine.

Your suggestions?

SuMu · 2009-06-15 09:38:10

http://www.blogpolls.com/ ?

colak · 2009-06-15 12:53:12

hi SuMu, thanks for the suggestion but I am looking for something which can reside in the server and has the ability of multiple questions.

jakob · 2009-06-15 14:40:21

hi Yiannis, I don’t how complicated your surveys will be (e.g. a make-or-breaker may be if it has to be multipage or not), but if simple you might be able to use mem_simple_form which is a bit like mem_form/zcr but saves to a custom MySQL table of your own making and good ‘ol smd_query to retrieve and parse the results.

colak · 2009-06-15 15:35:41

Hi Jakob, We are discussing the future of our website over here. Not that we want to take it down but we are preparing a multi-question survey which will help us understand what our visitors would like to see more. As we are an NGO all content is added in our spare time so we would like to see if we can focus on what is more important and supply more of ‘that’. Our questions which are still under development have some ‘traps’ so as to help us decipher the real needs of our visitors.

Our statistics help to a point but they also count spam referrers which is no good.

What we are looking for is

multi question cabability
log ip and prevent same ip to vote twice
cookies for the same reason
tabular interface of results (graphical interface will also be good but we can also work without it)
bot resistant

jakob · 2009-06-15 17:22:59

Well, using mem_simple_form is going to be more complex than using some external tool like surveymonkey, wufoo and co because you’ll have to build it yourself but in principle I think it would be possible. I hasten to add I’ve not tried it before in the constellation you mention, so the following is “in theory possible”:

In essence mem_simple_form is like mem_form is like zem_contact_reborn, except that it stores the data in a mysql table you have to set up separately (manually). You can have multiple questions just like with zcr but what I don’t know is whether you can make several forms chained together (johnstephens has been trying to get a multiple-step form working). If they can all reside on one page then that should be okay.

You can grab the IP address of a visitor using php (e.g. google shows this) and put that in a hidden form input. Not sure off hand how you can use that to stop voting twice but you can certainly remove duplicates later. Seeing as many ISPs assign a new IP every day, the cookie method would be more reliable.

You can use chs_cookie to set a cookie when sending the form that you test against before showing the form to prevent repeat voting.

If you’ve not used smd_query before you can output the individual data fields more or less how you want them. A table should be no problem and you can be cut and paste into excel/numbers for further processing etc.

bot resistant – perhaps a honey-pot à la pap_contact_cleaner would be simplest, although not totally foolproof. I’m not sure if it works with mem_simple_form but mem_form allows callbacks in the same way as zcr to test if honeypot fields have been filled out and rejects the form (see here).

colak · 2009-06-15 18:00:50

Wow!… Thanks Jakob. It seems that I’ll have some work for the next few days:)

Will definitely try your suggestions.

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#1 2009-06-15 08:59:29

survey tool

#2 2009-06-15 09:38:10

Re: survey tool

#3 2009-06-15 12:53:12

Re: survey tool

#4 2009-06-15 14:40:21

Re: survey tool

#5 2009-06-15 15:35:41

Re: survey tool

#6 2009-06-15 17:22:59

Re: survey tool

#7 2009-06-15 18:00:50

Re: survey tool

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