Before discovering ClassCreator, we mailed a reunion survey to our classmates. Now we have an online version of the survey and would like to enter the responses from the paper survey using the respondents' names. I guess this requires that an administrator be able to impersonate a user. Is such a feature available to anyone other than Brad and the ClassCreator staff?

While I can't answer your question, David, I do want to say how much I like your CC website. Very clean, nice typography and a nice collection of photos from past reunions.

All done in about a week!

Well done! -- Anyone else cruising through this thread should take a look!

I took a look at your survey, and I see your dilemma due to the kinds of questions being asked. However, for privacy reasons, we do protect the classmates profiles and reserve the ability to log in as these classmates for CC staff only.

In this scenario, unfortunately, you may need to ask the classmates to fill out the form again. I would just explain to them that by doing this, you will have access to complete survey results that will be easy to share among the class. I suspect they will be understanding of the request.

And, by the way, I too think you have done well with your site.

Thanks for your quick response and your kind words about our site.

However, I don't understand your comment about protecting user profiles. As administrator, I can use the Manage Classmates link to change user profiles, so where is the protection?

I think it's important to allow the administrator to edit any information entered by a user, including surveys whose results are visible to all users. Obviously it would be wrong for the administrator to change anything that would slant the survey, but it's sometimes necessary to change or remove offensive or off-color comments.

It seems inconsistent to allow an administrator to make survey results visible to all users but not allow the administrator to edit them.

Thanks again for your excellent support.

I'm sorry, I didn't quite communicate that clearly. If you had the ability to log in as a classmate, you would be able to page posts to forums and message other members as that classmate, which is a potential issue. You are correct that you can edit the profile information and serve as the site moderator in that capacity.

Hope that was a clearer thought.

I thought that's what you meant, and I agree that giving administrators the ability to impersonate users is probably not a good idea. However, for the reasons I mentioned, it would be nice to allow an administrator to edit a survey response just as we can edit a profile, Any chance of that happening?

I have no problem with that happening, no. I also have no problem with the Admin entering survey responses on behalf of members -- if responses can be edited in the future I don't see much difference anyway. The Admin should have full control over everything, it's just 2 things here that we haven't built in but should. I'll pass this on to Programming, although at the moment we're in the middle of a multi-week significant restructuring of the system so we can make some new abilities possible that people have asked for. Thus we won't be working on the Survey Maker again until after that, but yes at that time we'll definitely add these 2 abilities. Until then Classmates will have to edit their own responses or give you access to their login info.

Brad Switzer wrote:

This will then be consistent with the ability of the Admin to edit Reunion Planner information completed by members.

Thanks. You guys are great!

As long as you will be working on the Survey Maker module as discussed above, could you also add a few tracking features that will make this form generation tool even more powerful? Here's my list:

1. A way to see who has or has not responded;
2. A way to send a nag email to the non-responders;
3. A way to send an update email to the responders, typically to let them know that the form has changed and they should update their response.
4. A way to gather the links to various surveys into a single page so they don't clutter the left-side menu.

Of these, the first two are the most important.

Thanks,
Dave Schmitt

A flyout system is coming as part of a major system overhaul that will take at least the next 10 weeks. After that you'll have the ability to create and control flyout menus, and at that time I'm sure we can incorporate multiple surveys into the same flyout menu system. So all this is coming, but this one is gunna be awhile in the making. Stay tuned.