>1) There is no space for a free form user comment or two and I felt that I
>wanted at least a line or two - (maybe a single tabbed page) to qualify my
>answers / add a small comment .

This is a good suggestion.

>2) Ranking (without qualification) is very open to misunderstanding..
>
>EG
>
>I rank ItemA with a 1
>I rank ItemB with a 2
>
>Does this make ItemA more important than ItemB because I ranked it first
>or is ItemB more important than ItemA because I gave it a higher 'score'.
>
>The market research industry ( in which I work ) goes to significant
>lengths to avoid this.. because it is often not clear from the context
>and respondents are notoriously lazy in their reading of written
>questions..
>
>The problem is also easy if tedious to deal with EG
>
>"Give a score of importance from 0 to 5 where
>0 = no importance
>5 = high importance"

I'll take this suggestion into consideration. I agree that ranking is less
accurate than rating.

>3) As a general rule I hate questionnaires that have to be completed
>on-line..
>I want to download; go off-line; answer the questions; review my answers;
>some time later perhaps on the next connection; transmit the answers and
>this questionnaire doesn't allow this.

Actually, this one does allow that. This first versions didn't but now it
will save all settings in an INI so the next time you go to run it your
previous answers are there. This survey is also designed to allow you to
change your mind and submit the information over and over again. It
overwrites your previous settings each time as long as you use the same
email address and password.

You may be misled because I immediately test the connection. This is just to
make sure that you are able to connect to the database server. For some
reason not all machines are able to and I didn't want anyone wasting their
time filling out the survey if they couldn't connect to the database. It
actually disconnects and then when you finish it reconnects again and
transfers the data.

>However - enough of niggles - I assume this is a relatively short lived
>project and I guess you'll accumulate the data you need quite easily..

Thanks for the excellent feedback.

I understand Helen is working dilligently to get the web-site at
http://www.interbase2000.org all ready to yank the curtains back on. It
won't be fully dynamic right off but we look to getting it rolling asap. We
have a lot of things as a community to accomplish and it has been a bear
trying to get all the pieces in place for this to work. We appreciate your
patience and hope you will fully participate as each piece comes online.
Soon we will publish the results of the survey. It is one of the first
objectives to complete this when the dynamic piece comes on-line.

Kind regards,
Jason Wharton
InterBase Developer Initiative
jwharton@...