vB Survey: Add a full-featured survey tool to your forum

A 3.6.x version by spikeman is posted here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=131650


What this hack does:

This hack will add a full featured survey application system to your forum. You can survey your members opinions on various topics, or allow usergroups to create their own surveys.

Credits: John W. Holmes: Author of UCCASS Survey.

Application Features: See the UCCASS site for full details. After testing several survey apps, I find this one to be the best:

http://www.bigredspark.com/survey.html

The UCCASS offers some advanced features such as branching conditionals (allows hiding/displaying questions based on specific answers), result filtrations and much more.

Integration features:
Replaced authentication with VB's user database
Set permissions per usergroup, for admin/edit/create/take and view results priviliges.
Replaced config files with vB admin settings
Applied vB style to the UCCASS templates (it uses Smarty)

vB Survey added features: (some will be ported back to UCCASS)
Added anonymity option. If a survey is not anonymous, members can see how other members answered.
Added Hide/unhide survey option. This is useful to send surveys to specific users or usergroups.
Added Date answer types (D), with dropdown lists for day, month, year to ensure correct date entry.
Added REGEX control for new answer types, to control the answer format.
Added size control for single like text answers and REGEX answers.

Liscense: The original UCCASS Survey application is released under a modified GPL Liscense (Aferro GPL) : http://www.bigredspark.com/survey/license.txt (or look under the /docs directory in the zip file)

Installation difficulty:
o File changes: None
o DB changes: No changes, 19 new tables

Installation:

• Unpack the included file
• Copy vbsurvey_install.php to your admincp directory
• Copy survey.php to your main forum directory
• Copy the survey directory below your forum directory (cannot change the directory name)
• run the vbsurvey_install.php script in the admincp directory
• Go to AdminCP => vBulletin Options => vB Survey (UCCASS) and set the toptions for acess and other settings
• If you get permission errors, change file permissions for the survey directory and its contents to 744, and the owner/group to apache:apache (or, some servers are setup to nobody:nobody):

cd /path/to/main/forum
chown -R apache:apache survey
chmod -R 744 survey

Upgrade Instructions:
If you are upgrading from vB 3.0.x to vB 3.5 and already had this hack installed, all you need to do is download the zip file, and re-uploade all the files to over-write the old ones.

Added in v1.7.1 (August 26th, 2005

• Hide edit menu if user not allowed to edit surveys.

Added in v1.7 (August 7th, 2005

• Bug fix in editing answer types.

Added in v1.6 (June 12th, 2005

• Upgraded for vB 3.5 beta
• Upgrad instructions: If you already have vB Survey 1.5 installed, you just need to upload all files, but no need to run the upgrade script.

Added in v1.5 (June 7th, 2005

• Added a new answer type R, for Regular Expressions (REGEX). This will allow new types to be defined for answers, with controlled format. If the question is required, users will receive an error messages, until they enter the proper format. If the question is optional, the users will only get an error if they try to answer the question, but with the wrong format.
  Note: You can disable REGEX type questions by editing the templates.
• The Size of type 'S' (Sentence) can now be changed, and no longer hardcoded as 50 characters.
• To upgrade, you will need to run the upgrade option in the installation script and re-upload all the files.

Added in v1.3 (June 5th, 2005

• Added a new answer type D, for Dates. This will show 3 dropdown lists for day, month, year, to ensure a uniform formate for dates entered by the user, instead of a text box.
• Fixed a bug in the anonymous message display. It would state survey is not anonymous, when it actually is.
• To upgrade, just re-upload the files (classes and templates directories)

Added in v1.2 (June 4th, 2005)

• Removed the "Previous page" button, if the page is the first page of a survey.
• Answers in the new/edit answer page are sorted by the numeric value. This allows you to add a later value, but set the order higher, without re-editing the whole list to arrange it.
• Fixed a bug in quotes and escapes in the answer types edit.
• Upgrade instructions: Just re-upload the classes directory.

Added in v1.1 (June 4th, 2005)

• Added anonymity option. This is decided when creating the survey. Once set, it cannot be changed. If the survey is not anonymous, users will see on the survey intro a message that they survey is not anonymous, and that their usernames will show in the results table. The results table will show the usernames and a link to their profile.
• Added Hidden option: By default, all active surveys show up on the main page as available surveys. If you set the survey propert to hidden, the survey can still be active, but not show up for members. This can be useful if you want to email the link to a selected user group. Admins and the survey author will still be able to see hidden surveys.
• Navbar update to list the various locations in the survey pages.
• The previous version showed the "no permission" to guests. Now you can allow guests to view the surveys and results by putting usergoup 0 in the admin panel in usergroups who may see the results. But other priviliges will be ignored.
• A couple of bug fixes
• Upgrade instructions: Just re-upload all the files, including survey.php

Notes:
The "do not remove" comment on the copyright link in the footer is from the original UCCASS footer template. You may contac the original author, John W. Holmes, for permission to remove the copyright notice, he's willing to talk according to their support forum.

Please click Install if you have installed this mod.

[OrangeFlea]

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.

[trilljester]

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.

[klaush]

Originally Posted by tamarian

Does the file exist at that path?

Yes!

[zingo]

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.

[zingo]

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.

[zingo]

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.

[phonexpo]

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 ?

[zingo]

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.

[phonexpo]

Originally Posted by zingo

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.

[Warrior]

Nice, clean survey!

[SUBSCRIBING for later reference...]