[Nms-cgi-devel] Delurk, and wish for a survey script (sorry, "program")

[Samuel M. (Home) <le...@ab...>]

G'day everyone

I did a brief search of the archives and did not find a wishlist item 
like this one.  It would be great if there could be a survey script.

The survey script would basically be a formmail script with more 
elaborate instructions or commented-out HTML.  It must be possible to 
have multipage surveys.

One way to kludge the fact that a single visitor may submit multiple 
pages (and therefore multiple mails) is to have a "name" field at the 
top for the person's name (or code), that is stored in a cookie and 
automatically filled in on each subsequent page's "name" field, until 
the last page of the survey is reached, at which time the cookie is 
deleted.  This will means multiple mails per visitor, but at least 
you'll be able to see which mails belong to which users.

I guess it could be made more sophisticated too, if the script can store 
the information from the previous pages until the last page is reached, 
and only send the survey results when the final submit button is 
pressed.  Then you'll get a single e-mail instead of several.

The cookie can still be used, perhaps, to ensure that multiple and 
simultaneous visitors from the same IP address are not confused with 
each other on the server.

There are several free survey sites but they all offer very limited free 
services (eg only 10 responses, or only a summary of results), or the 
display banner adverts inappropriate for the survey.

The reason for multipage surveys is simple:  nothing is more annoying 
than filling in a long form and then the browser hangs or you accidently 
close the page.  A survey script would avoid that -- the user can stop 
the survey at any time and continue from where he left off later.

Your thoughts?

Samuel