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Stacia Marlett wondered: <<We're going to revamp our feedback system
for our online help. Currently we assign a URL to a button at the
bottom of each help topic. Clicking the button opens a new window with
a bunch of questions and a Submit button. Then someone else in our
group puts the feedback in a spreadsheet.>>
Sounds like a solution that's ripe for automation. Any reason you
couldn't replace this with a forms-based approach? The simplest
solution (i.e., least progamming) is to use something like FormMail (or
a similar CGI script) that e-mails you the results of filling in the
form as ASCII text that you can easily import into a spreadsheet or
database.
You can certainly get far more sophisticated than that if your pet
geeks are interested in playing with new toys; it should be possible to
directly stock the database, eliminating the manual import step,
without much work. That's way beyond my expertise, but I've read about
it being done and I'm sure someone here can provide specific details.
<<We've gotten very little feedback over the course of a year with our
online help system.>>
This is hardly surprising. If your product's users are typical, many
(perhaps the majority) aren't using your online help system at all
(they play around until they figure it out, or call their favorite geek
and beg for help), and most of the others can't be bothered to provide
feedback either because they're too busy or because they don't believe
you do anything with the feedback. If you can't provide strong
incentive to use the system and provide feedback, this won't change.
<<Plus, we've abandoned the unique URL in most recent help topics
because we ran out of numbers (to tack onto the end of the URL) and
nobody seemed to know how to get more.>>
What, you mean the universe finally ran out of numbers? I always
secretly suspected this would happen some day. I only hope that the
end, when it comes, comes quickly. <gdrlh>
OK, as non-sarcastically as I can possibly muster while still giggling
over the possibility of running out of numbes: So long as you have a
finite number of help topics, you cannot possibly run out of numbered
HTML pages. All HTML pages become the following:
"www.example.com/feedback/helpIDnumber.html". Problem solved!
If you mean that you've got so many help topics that you've exceeded
the number of bits allocated to assigning Help IDs, I can't help you,
other than to suggest that the usual solution is to break the help
system up into sufficiently small chunks that you no longer run out of
help IDs.
<<This method was way too much work. We also recognize that our
feedback form was way too long.>>
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