Survey participation

This is certainly not anonymous.

The link takes you to a google login! No way on earth can Google be described as anonymous!

... and that is even before the folk at bit.ly start tracking you.

I suggest that if you genuinely want survey results you select an alternative to both providers.

I do not have a /Google account and certainly will not create one.

Sorry, I was not clear enough. When I said the survey is anonymous is from the point of view of the PHP Classes site.

I just wanted to make clear that this survey is not a trick for PHP Classes to get the email addresses of the users that fill the survey.

The idea to require the user to be logged is to prevent that somebody votes multiple times and distort the results.

Of course internally Google keeps track of the accounts used to vote. It is just the PHP Classes site does not have access to the accounts information. It is not useful anyway.

The use of bit.ly was to make a nicer and easier to memorize short URL that people can pass around. Google forms have short URLs but they are generated randomly and are impossible to memorize.

Well the survey is now rolling. Many hundreds of users submitted it.

But if in the future the site organizes other surveys, do you have a suggestion of any other survey provider service that would be more trustworthy than Google in your opinion?

Why do you need a web service to manage a poll? There must be some decent polling classes out there. Lately, Google is positioning itself poorly and if they are not careful, they are going to go the way of Yahoo.

Dave

How about create a survey of phpclass's own? it's easy to grasp an open code and there you go. if google is not trustworthy, I don't think there are many public survey platforms worth it.

It was mainly a matter of time it would take to customize the survey.

The PHP Classes site already has a basic poll system that was used in the design contest organized in 2009/2010 to pick a new design for the site from proposals submitted by the users.

phpclasses.org/winners/award/design ...

The problem is that it would take a good time to customize the voting system for this type of survey.

Another aspect is that Google Forms have a nice way of presenting the results that is ready to use when the results are published.

Finally I wanted to open the survey process to non-PHP Classes users, so nobody needed to have an account in the site to participate.

Users would need to have an account somewhere, so the system prevents users participating more than once and distort the results.

Whatever system was used, I suspect there would be probably some complaints.

Anyway, I was not aware Google would have so much rejection. If there is some other system that has less rejection, I would appreciate suggestions, as there may be other surveys in the future.

Yes, such survey system exists on the site as I mentioned above, but it is not developed enough for this survey that I just had an idea to create last week.

Mauuel

Thanks for the response.

I am not so worried about the anonymity with regard to PHPClasses, after all you already have my email and details. Tracking a link followed to a poll would be simplicity itself.

My concern is all about the adoption of a polling system that actually requires the respondent to register and login to the Google system before any response to the poll can be made.

You are in effect excluding the many (potentially) users of PHPClasses from even accessing the poll as they do not have a Google account and for justifiable reasons refuse to subscribe or simply block everything Google due their intrusive policies.

So far from being widely inclusive, as you state as your intention, you at a stoke restricting voting to a subset of respondents.

There are certainly external alternatives out there that do not require any changes to the PHPClasses site code. They are easy enough to set up and they can be found by any respectable (not Google) search engine so I shall not give any one suggested preference by advertising them here.

But I am in agreement with most comments here that what better way to promote this site than by using the classes made available by this site? Indeed, the suggestion that there are none that can be easily used internally by the PHPClasses site speaks volumes about the quality of the classes presented by it.

I don't think Manuel was speaking to the quality of classes here on phpClasses, there are some good ones, some not so good ones and some occasional legacy issues.

Instead, google provides a lot of web services that are tempting to use since they are fairly simple to use, however their purpose is to increase profits through data mining, not to give back to the web community. I am just not sure he is aware of how much google's recent practices are alienating them from those who are web savvy.

Dave

Yes, I agree whatever system was used to keep track of the users, it would turn down some users that would refuse to register and login to participate.

As for using existing classes to make the survey, there is nothing wrong with them. As I said, the site could have used its own survey system or use other nice classes that actually exist in the site.

It was all a matter of time. The idea to make the poll came from a discussion in the lately in PHP podcast on October 5. There was no time to make the site poll system work in time to announce it before PHP 7 is released very likely next Monday, which is when I intend to publish the results.

Yes, it is the main Google business activity to show advertising optimized for the context.

So they may show advertising optimized for the context shown in a page, or an email message, or even keep showing you the same advertising of products from pages that already visited in other sites.

This is a bit scary because people always get the feeling Google is watching you everywhere and knows more about your private life than you would like.

No wonder many people are using ad blocking browser extensions.

I don't know if Google plans to use any information collected from surveys for something that makes us uncomfortable. But so far we do not have any evidence of that. We just don't know about the future.

I think the future of advertising is more about native ads. Those are ads that are embedded in pages like native content, but they are retrieved from a pool of relevant ads listed randomly rather than being optimized for the current user.

The PHP Classes newsletter ads are native ads. They are about Web development topics regardless of the identity of user. Ads that dynamically identify the users require JavaScript but JavaScript is blocked by mail programs for security and privacy reasons. So those ads not optimized for the user and display time like regular Google ads.