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. :-)
Thanks, Erik
Hi Erik,
I don't know of a better tool than LimeSurvey but I have posted a similar question a while ago, and some of the replies at http://friendfeed.com/danielmietchen/2e2b1da8/looking-for-options-web-based-... may be useful here.
Daniel
On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
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. :-)
Thanks, Erik
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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* Erik Moeller erik@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
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