Re: Proposal for an Emacs User Survey

[Jean Louis]

* Philip K. <philipk@posteo.net> [2020-10-11 21:34]:
> Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> writes:
> 
> > * Teemu Likonen <tlikonen@iki.fi> [2020-10-10 11:35]:
> >> * 2020-10-09 19:12:23-04, Adrien Brochard wrote:
> >> 
> >> > Please find the list of questions I have gathered at the end of this
> >> > email.
> >> 
> >> Great! I would like to see this survey conducted. It would be
> >> interesting to see what people use Emacs for and some distribution of
> >> answers. It's not easy to find good sample of users but if the survey is
> >> published in some main communication platforms or communities it will be
> >> good enough, I think.
> >
> > If survey is published, for example on Reddit, such survey is narrow
> > and specific to Reddit users, and would represent only that
> > communication channel.
> >
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

If the eww's eww-submit function get dissected, maybe there will be
simplest POST function, then library forms.el can be used to POST the
information to GNU servers, which in turn arrives by email
easily. Even the CGI script can be written in Emacs Lisp to accept the
email and send into the queue for approval before publishing it to
mailing list.

That would not need to load full eww, it can display users few fields,
if one wish to enter some personal information or not, it would be
equal.

Form would send it to server.

Server side Emacs CGI would send email to queue mailman or some
mailing list manager for approval or censorship :-)

Emails would be sent from form-submission@gnu.org to mailing list with
Reply-To: email address of user who submitted the form. But what if
email address is not working?!

Other users or developers could collaborate or answer questions.

See: share/emacs/28.0.50/etc/forms