Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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  > > The most obvious reason to me is that user error handling is pretty
  > > poor. Because there is no JS, we cannot offer front-end validation, that
  > > means that the backend server is responsible for validating fields
  > > submitted. If validation does not pass, the page must "reload" for the
  > > user and it needs to show exactly what went wrong and preserve the user
  > > input. That's my definition of a site that reloads all the time.

  > That could be mitigated with a "graceful degradation" approach, since
  > most people do have javascript activated by default. HTML5 also has a
  > few attributes that could help, such as pattern or required, depending
  > on what questions are being asked.

It is ok to send some JS code, which is labeled as free such that
LibreJS recognizes it, which does nothing except validate the inputs.
So that a person who enters valid inputs would see no difference between
running the JS code and not running it.

  > >>> - mysql instead of sqlite, which also implies a mysql instance running
  > >>
  > >> SQLite is actually surprisingly resilient, according to [0]:

It would be a mistake to put the input into any sort of database
program.  That would only make things difficult and increase the
special knowledge people would need in order to work on this.

Here's the simple and clean way to do it.

Each time a user responds, convert all the answers into a formulaic
piece text which states the questions and answers.  Email that to a
certain address, which will accumulate these messages in one inbox
file.

Then it will be simple to do all sorts of counting or analysis on that
file.

Database programs are useful when there are hundreds of thousands of
records and you need to search for any one of them.  Or when the data
are being altered.  We will not have so many answers, and each one
will never change once sent.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)