Replace LimeSurvey

Right now if you want to run self-hosted surveys on the web you have very few choices. The best choice, LimeSurvey, is a hot dumpster fire of horrific CSS, bad UX and bad defaults. In this page Hypothesis and others sketch a proposal to write a replacement for this software which avoids its worst flaws and hopefully improves on its everything.

Design Inspirations

Inspirations

YourMorals

What YourMorals Does Right

List view for surveys which makes it easy and convenient to participate in more than one.
Ability to join a group and have your survey results compared to that group in addition to other referents.
Relatively free form, basic survey views which allow for flexibility in presentation and focus on content rather than extraneous crap.
Site saves your results and allows you to view them later.

Opportunities For Improvement

Can only join one group at a time, would be nice to be able to more easily manage being part of multiple groups and using them as referents when you take surveys.
Fairly hard to share survey results without uploading images to another medium such as imgur because of the absolutely atrocious link structure used to generate them.
Surveys are almost *too* basic in terms of style, could easily improve their aesthetics without introducing a ton of needless crap. (See JD's website (archived) and Read The Sequences (archived) if you're skeptical.)
Saving results for all time is a security risk.
Platform does not allow users to save a copy of their answers to a survey.
A user is only allowed to participate in a study once, which is probably fine except that you may want to have a system where you can track a users responses over time and thus allow them to take the study again.

Damnations

LimeSurvey

What LimeSurvey Does Wrong

Made for non-technical users has its own internal system for handling every aspect of survey creation. Many places to fail and be mediocre.
Horrible template editor whose use is basically a requirement to interact with the system. Minimal development tooling besides copying a survey as a test environment.
Awful default template which requires a lot of effort to make user friendly.
Did we mention the CSS is an abomination?
In part a direct consequence of the last thing, incredibly slow. We're talking load times well past the single digit second mark. Surveys are in principle question text, form HTML, and some images. There is no excuse for it taking more than a few seconds to load.
It's software whose development is paid through support. Security updates are a paid feature.
The general report generator doesn't even completely work, to do the 2016 LessWrong survey I had to write my own report generator. This is what took the bulk of time in presenting the survey results.

Saving Graces

LimeSurvey does provide a fairly nice data export interface.
It's possible to allow users to export a copy of their answers. YourMorals does not do this.
LimeSurvey provides a variety of useful export options for survey content and settings.
.lss shown above is a relatively sane XML (i.e, easily parsed) format