This week I've been benchmarking and testing a bunch of open source
survey platforms [1].
[1]:
https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/survey_platform/
I'm doing this initially as part of our work on VeraCrypt (#14474) but
also thinking that doing surveys regularly would be a very good way of
knowing more about our users on the long run: who they are, what they do
with Tails, etc.
We've been doing intercept interviews [2] with few people but so far we
have close to no quantitative data source on users and usage (except
WhisperBack reports and raw web server logs).
[2]:
https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/intercept_interviews/
I'm putting tails-sysadmins in copy because I'd like to here about how
we could host this on our infrastructure. I thought that we could, for
now, limit ourselves to using it for the duration of the VeraCrypt work
(either only for VeraCrypt or to try other things as well). And once
VeraCrypt is over, do some evaluation and see if it needs adjustment, if
we keep it, etc. At least I see it as something that can disappear at
some point without much trouble if we're not happy with it and it won't
break anything badly.
So basically, I found only one option for something feature full and
mature: LimeSurvey [3].
[3]:
https://www.limesurvey.org/
If we don't want LimeSurvey for some reasons we can probably fallback on
TellForm or Kinto.
I tried to install LimeSurvey and it's super easy: unzip the thing in an
Apache directory, create a MariaDB, and go. I didn't need any dependency
on top of what I already had installed on this machine for Piwik (Apache
and PHP).
Despite being super complete I could create a survey very easily and
embed it on my local version of our website. See attachment.
The default template displays stuff quite big and, depending on the time
we have and how easy this is, we could try to tweak it a bit. Otherwise
if we think it's too bad to be embedded and don't want to work on a
better template now we can point people to the full page version.
But at least embedding can remain an option for the future. There are
also consulting companies recommended by LimeSurvey if that's too
complicated and not worth learning.
One downside, in terms of UX, is that I couldn't find how to put a
Captcha on submission of the form, but only on the welcome screen before
accessing the form. At least for the future, I imagined asking the
questions upfront and then validating them with a Captcha when
submitting the form. But we can probably workaround this with other
types of attention check questions.
Note that other platforms wouldn't do any better as they don't have
captchas at all :)
Something weird about LimeSurvey's business model and version scheme is
that they publish "stable" releases every day (currently 2.71.1+170927).
They also have an LTS (currently 2.06+LTS) which is for pay. I also
couldn't find information on what are the benefits of the LTS: security
updates?
They have an auto-update mechanism ("one-click") called ComfortUpdate
that you have to pay for.
https://www.limesurvey.org/editions-and-prices/limesurvey-ce/editions-and-prices-community
I'm not really sure what to think about that :)
Note that the other platforms have version and packaging scheme that
bring even less confidence. See blueprint.
I'll also contact Hiro from Tor who are also working on a way to do
surveys, but as far as I understand they are writing something
themselves from scratch.
