Comment forms are a convenient way to get feedback from visitors to your Web site. A simple comment form that generates email is the easiest to set up and maintain. For further information, see the CWIS documents Forms on web.mit.edu and the Forms FAQ.
A more complicated form can collect information from visitors to your Web site, which is then processed into survey results or used to generate new Web pages. Approaches to handling survey results in generated pages are summarized below. Which approach is best for you will depend on your needs for the information, how critical the generated pages will be as a resource to your readers, and how quickly the input from the forms should be reflected in the generated pages. You will also need to take into account your level of programming expertise.
If the results from a survey form do not need to be reflected immediately in your Web pages, the data can be collected as email, reviewed, and used to generate new pages. This process can be automated, or involve human intervention. The generated pages will be static and can be served easily from web.mit.edu or another IS Web server. This is the simplest and safest approach, as it insures that the generated information will always be available. Also, it protects your site from accidental or malicious use of the survey input forms.
An intermediate level involves a database fed by the forms, but from which static pages are generated periodically. This is more difficult to set up, but possibly more convenient to use. It also provides the safety of not feeding the pages directly from the database.
Immediate generation of Web pages from survey information requires the use of a database. Information is taken from the input on the forms and transferred into a database, which then supplies dynamically generated Web pages. Critical to such a system are stable, secure, supported servers. Also critical are stable and reliable databases, which require a certain level of database administration expertise to produce and maintain.
The email generated by a form can go to one or more individuals (designated when setting up the form), a mailing list, or a Discuss meeting. A mailing list is generally preferable over individual email addresses, because individuals may be added to or removed from the list without needing to change any of your form templates. Discuss meetings may have email interfaces which can be included in the mailing list.
Contact the Faculty Liaisons Faculty Liaisons (f_l@mit.edu) for help with setting up an email list or Discuss meeting for your academic use.
All of the email from a form submission must be collected into one place.
This can be done by an individual as the mail arrives, or the
Discuss meeting can be used as an archive.
Collect email submissions into a directory. Collect submissions extracted from the Discuss
meeting into a single file (the Athena command dsgrep
may be used to extract the
submissions from the Discuss meeting).
After the form submissions are collected, you can run a script called process-comments to extract the information from the collection into a single file. The data in this file will be in a convenient format for inclusion in databases, spreadsheets, or custom programs.