Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Jean Louis]

* Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> [2020-10-11 22:48]:
> > > My proposal on how to publish a survey is to include that in the Help
> > > menu, and let people do it straight from Emacs. That is similar to bug
> > > reporting, but it is not a bug, it is feature request.
> > 
> > But if you have to have mail configured, you're also only going to have
> > a specific subset of all users.
> 
> Nothing _limits_ input to email.  That's all we handle today, and we
> should at least continue to handle such input.  But if we want to
> entertain supporting other input methods (smoke signals...
> whatever), that's not impossible.

Is hard for me to understand the above.

Let me say that trends changed, there are now more people using
Internet, and there are more people using Internet without email or
not knowing what email does, or having email, but never using it and
not knowing what it does, including people having email and using it
exclusively on their mobile devices, not knowing they can use it from
computers.

Suspicious is also Windows and other systems but Unix-like systems,
I did not try, I just don't know how would report-emacs-bug function
on Windows, I doubt it is well integrated.

I would just make it as a form, either as Emacs forms from forms.el
library, plus some POST to URL, or as HTML form by using eww.

In such form, user could enter email, but if user does not have email,
need not enter such, neither the name. User could still communicate,
it would be one way, but better some opinions then none, hey.

> > I think the idea of having a survey that could be filled out from Emacs
> > is interesting (although we would only get to hear from current users,
> > not previous users). But it would have to work regardless of what the
> > user has configured or not. From what I see, that would either mean a
> > web form that can be filled out using EWW or a package that could be
> > downloaded from ELPA.
> 
> It's not only either/or.
> 
> The point of the suggestion was to leverage the existing
> `report-emacs-bug' input of general, free-form feedback.  Where
> "leverage" also means encourage.  And that in turn means new names
> (command alias, menu items,... whatever) and some new description
> (e.g. rework the wording of the existing bug-reporting
> instructions).

Not sure, I would leave report-emacs-bug in place, and add feedback or
suggestions with different wording, including access to friendly
mailing lists and IRC channel.

So far fastest way to get live help for Emacs is IRC.