* Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> [Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:40:07 -0700]:
Hi folks,
we've been using LimeSurvey for the last couple of years to run
Wikimedia surveys, but as we pushed it to its limits, we've surfaced
numerous problems, including security vulnerabilities and major
concurrency issues. It's got many of the right capabilities and may
be fixable, but it would take a very significant amount of effort to
do so.
Do folks on this list have experience with other good open source
survey tools that you've used at scale, or seen used at scale?
Yes, there's always the option of rolling our own (perhaps building on
Jeroen's new survey extension for MediaWiki) -- but do keep in mind
that surveys can get pretty technically complex, so that may be
prohibitive for some of the surveys we're planning to run.
We're looking at both open and proprietary solutions, but if anyone
has any tips, they'd be much appreciated. I'd like to avoid lock-in to
a proprietary solution if at all possible. :-)
If you are thinking about something like their example
http://survey.limesurvey.org/index.php
my Extension:QPoll (which is in Wikimedia SVN) can do most of it.
Although it is still in development and not really scalable. I know that
scalability is very important issue and I plan to EXPLAIN most of
queries and use memcached storage, however I still don't have enough of
time to develop it fast enough.
Dmitriy