Survey of the Month

Survey Of The Month is a website built around the idea of pseudorandom question generator. Expanding on that, users can also create full surveys, share them with their friends, or take a survey. And then view everyone's answers in a presentation.

Disclaimer

This is a fun side project, any feature updates or bug fixes are not guaranteed.

Try It Out

Survey of the Month

Tracery

This app is built around a ground up version of Tracery, with some custom modifications.

The basic idea is you load a dictionary with each entry having an array of strings. You start with some origin key then take a random string from that list and look for any more keys denoted by This is a #key#.

{
    "origin": [ "#intro_question#", "#question#", "#close_question#" ],

    "intro_question": [
        "[type:text]How are you doing this fine day of #monthNow#?",
        "[type:multi][key:generalAnswers]Are you excited to take this survey?"
    ]
}

Duplicate Prevention

• In order to stop the same values appearing multiple times in the same result we check to see if we've already seen the given value.
• This way if you call the same #key# multiple times you should not get duplicated until you've seen all the options.
• #color# with #color# and #color# -> "blue with red and green"
  • Should never become "blue with blue and red"

Order Of Operations

• Inline choices are always parsed first, allowing you to choose between multiple keys before parsing them
• Variables are next, variable values are parsed during this time too.
  • Ex: [animal1:#animal#] -> "animal1":"duck"
• Lastly all remaining keys are parsed

---

Probabilities

• Given the following grammar:

  •   "origin": ["#sky.a# sky!"],
      "sky": ["#color#, "stormy"],
      "color": ["red", "blue", "orange", "white"]
    

  • The phrase "a stormy sky!" has a 50% chance to appear, while "a blue sky!" has only 12.5% chance
  • For simple grammar this isn't too much of an issue but once you get into cases were one option has 3 possibilities and another has 300 it can start to feel repetitive given you'll see the 3 possibility option 50% of the time.
• Solution:
  • Before selecting a random option get a list of all possible options 1 level deep. Then if an option has a #key# or ^$choiceA:choiceB$, give it a higher weighting in the random chance.
  • The more keys/choices an option has, the higher it's weighted

---

Running

Local Dev

Run npm run dev

Building Server.js

Run webpack

Run node server.bundle.js

Building/Packaging App

Run npm install -g gulp

Run gulp for building server and client

Git

git update-index --assume-unchanged FILE.EXT