Okay, I fixed the problem.

If you can't change the permissions via your FTP utility, then the best way to do it is through Cpanel. The permissions in Cpanel won't display the changes as you do them, but they ARE changed. I was frustrated because I didn't think it was working.

I recently upgraded to 3.5.4, and had to go to vbsurvey_install.php in my AdminCP directory, and clicked on Option #2 in the clean install section to get this mod to work after upgrading. It gave me an error, because of duplicate keys in my survey table, but it didn't hurt anything. Not sure why this was all needed, but that's what worked for me. Tam, Maybe an option to reinstall templates or rebuild templates after forum upgrade would help?

It appears that when upgrading VB, it wipes out the vbsurvey template, so it has to be reinstalled.

Yes!

The survey is an interesting hack. Thanks for providing it!

I can give the following feedback to help improve things:

1. It doesn't correctly respect its own usergroup setting. I have vb usergroup 1 (unregistered/guest) set to be allowed to take surveys and view results and when I attempt to navigate to survey.php, I get a login dialog.

2. Based on reading through this thread, you could probably save people some confusion by simply adding "go to yourforum/survey.php" to start making surveys. That final instruction is notably absent.

3. The page break handling is cumbersome. I should be able to enter questions, then a page break, then more questions. However, I have to go back and insert the page break by using the "insert after" feature, since a page break can't be the last question. The sanity check is good, but you should just display a warning, not prevent the operation. If you want to prevent the survey from working with a page break at the end, then throw the error and offer to delete it and continue.

4. Moving items around is tedious. After initially creating items, the box to insert at a specific position disappears from the edit window and you have to painstakingly click up-up-up-up or down-down-down, etc. on UI arrows to move things around in the question list.

Otherwise...so far so good. #1 is kind of a problem and I am about to go hack it, I guess.

OK...so...now that I have played around with it, the obvious reason for special casing the guest users to 0 access is that you can only have 1 unique user at an IP (even if it is a guest user). So, everyone needs a username.

For emailed surveys, it might work to use tokens in the links for each user so that they wouldn't have to register. But, I guess if you're going to email, then they might as well register at the forum It's just not optimal...and everyone has to be tracked.

It looks like vbSurvey is best for existing online communities. Based on my experience today, it does not seem to be a good replacement (in terms of recruitment) vs. an immediate paper survey. People don't seem to want to have to go through the registration process, but are willing to fill out an actual piece of paper.

In established, online communities where users don't have to register and already have an established traffic pattern, it would be great. They could take surveys all day.

From this reasoning, one feature vbSurvey could use is a mailmerge with a link token. To bridge the login overhead, the survey tool could take a list of email addresses, a note about the survey, and a replacement variable to insert a link. Then, it would generate a token based on some simple context-sensitive algorithm and apply it to the link, then do the email merge. All the survey admin would need to do is type up the note and paste in the address list. Remote users could click on the link and go straight to the survey without having to create a user account. (There are other services that work this way, I think).

Anyway...just a feature suggestion: email merge with an announcment and auto-generated unique, one-time, login token as part of the survey link.

I still think it's a handy product, but it is not turning out to be as useful as I initially expected because of the login constraint.

Thank you for this great feature tamarian. But I've a problem; I've uploaded the files but I don't see Go to AdminCP => vBulletin Options => vB Survey (UCCASS) and set the options for access and other settings, what have I done wrong ?

Another update: After my last post, I commented out a couple of checks to allow guests and eliminate IP checking. That helped a little, but introduces increased risk of flawed data collection. However, it does make it useful for doing data entry into a pre-defined database to get access to the stats and filtering. Being able to do survey email merge with one-time use tokens would be a great addition to your otherwise fine vb tool. The other thing that might be useful is a CSV import function to upload data records via the tool so that outside (paper) survey data efforts can be combined with web efforts. I'll have to take a look at some of the data filtering and provide feedback, etc.

phoneexpo: did you run the installer? If so, then go to your vbulletin adminCP and look at the last item under vBulletin Options at the top left. If not, then follow the directions for placing vbsurvey_install.php in your admincp directory, then direct your browser to: yourvbforumpath/youradmincpdirname/vbsurvey_install.php (for example: http://www.mydomain.com/forums/admin...ey_install.php.

Thanks zingo, I didn't run the install. I taught it was automatic. :)

Nice, clean survey!

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