Haiku LimeSurvey Instance

[jt15s]

NB: I originally posted this suggestion on the forums. PulkoMandy said it was a good idea and asked me to create a ticket here on Tracker.

LimeSurvey is an open-source survey tool (similar to Google Forms) that we can host on our own server and use to create surveys like kallisti5’s recent Haiku survey which was done using Google Forms. Since we will definitely be doing more surveys in future, it might be a good idea to consider a Haiku LimeSurvey instance so we can easily run surveys with virtually no limits (some survey solutions put limits on responses and questions) or worrying about privacy issues etc. with Google Forms (some members of the Haiku community may be reluctant to use Google Forms). More on LimeSurvey: ​https://community.limesurvey.org/

Some considerations:

• The addition of a LimeSurvey instance means One More Thing to maintain for our sysadmins
• LimeSurvey also needs dependencies like PHP and a database too, which need to be set up.

The full setup process can be found below: ​https://manual.limesurvey.org/Installation_-_LimeSurvey_CE

Thanks!

[nielx]

At first sight it does not seem to be a very complex application, and we seem to have the dependency down (it supports PostgreSQL). There are also some (non-official) Docker images:

• ​https://hub.docker.com/r/acspri/limesurvey
• ​https://hub.docker.com/r/crramirez/limesurvey
• ​https://github.com/martialblog/docker-limesurvey

It should be possible to reuse them, or to build a container that is very much like these.

The obvious downsides to hosting our own instance is that we need to keep it up to date for security purposes.

I'm wondering how often we are expecting to do surveys. While hosting the application ourselves does not require immediate investments, it is not free because it needs attention and maintenance. There may be paid solutions out there that are reasonably priced and that do not have the data sharing implications of Google. But then it really depends on whether we are planning to do surveys 3 times a year, or 3 times a month.

[jt15s]

I think people would be encouraged to do more surveys if we had a dedicated LimeSurvey installation - certainly, the Promotion Team would definitely conduct surveys if we had a survey application. I think we could also consider opening up the platform to Haiku application developers to conduct surveys to gauge user feedback.

It also means that any results of surveys we conduct can always be accessed by anyone at Haiku who has an account with the application - there is no risk of results being deleted as with some paid solutions or being lost if people who conduct the survey become inactive with the Project etc.