[jraph]

I'm secretly and slowly building a form building application. The idea is that in my association we don't want to rely on Google Forms. And we only want to use open source software. We are using FramaForms which is a bit clunky and doesn't have this feature that updates a spreadsheet automatically. I thought that I could just create something that would answer both concerns.

But a good open source forms app would probably change everything, I would gladly stop my small project (in favor of contributing to an existing one for instance). I see there is integration with a lot of products, including Google Drive and Google Sheet.

Would an integration with Nextcloud be considered?

Congratulations on open sourcing this, we need open source and self hosted form solutions. Critically private data is put in forms and that get sent to big private companies like Google, which is not ideal.

As other commenters say, you might want to use AGPL indeed, but I guess you carefully thought this decision.

[abdullahkhalids]

Grist has the ability to create forms that are automatically connected to their spreadsheets [1]. Though it doesn't seem like you can create sophisticated forms (with some logic in them for example) just yet.

I am thinking of moving my volunteer org away from Google forms towards Grist.

[1] https://support.getgrist.com/widget-form/

[effluvium]

FYSA

https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/LEAF

[dearroy]

Thank you for sharing your experience and insights. It would be fantastic if we could collaborate to make HeyForm better suited to your needs, as well as the needs of many others.

> Would an integration with Nextcloud be considered?

We are definitely interested in exploring this possibility. However, since I am not personally familiar with Nextcloud, it would be helpful if you could provide more details. Could you please open an issue so that we can discuss it further?

[jraph]

Sure, I'll take the time.

[flavaz]

Limesurvey is “good enough” for most applications and is open source- any reason why that wouldn’t work for your use case?

[jraph]

As far as I know, LimeSurvey can't auto update a spreadsheet with the answers.

But LimeSurvey has its advantages:

- it's in PHP, and our whole infra is already using it (WordPress and Nextcloud). So it's easier to setup and if we want bridges between these tools, it'll be easier.

- AFAIR, it doesn't require JS when filling a form and in particular, it's not a React app.

We have used LimeSurvey in the past, we got rid of it but I don't remember why, I should look into it another time.

Two other big requirements we have is solid conditional field support and easy to use form builder.

[flavaz]

Reason why I ask is that there are many form/survey builders out there, as people often underestimate the complexity it takes to set one up that supports things like max diff, routing etc.

Looking at the forums I can see that some have managed to achieve what you need via plugins (albeit the one I see that is confirmed working seems to be paid…)

Just thinking contributing an open source plugin to a great open source scripting tool would save you headaches down the road :)

[jraph]

You are right, this is a time consuming and a genuinely hard problem to tackle.

I have not been satisfied with existing software, but I would be happy to find out otherwise.

[blowski]

> But a good open source forms app would probably change everything

Can you go into that a bit more, I'm interested what you would see changing. Why do you think it hasn't been done already?

[krisoft]

My understanding of the comment is that “changing everything” should be understood in the context described by the begining of the comment. That is their organisation would stop using FramaForms, and the commenter would stop working on their replacement skunk project. That is all of those mentioned plans/activities would change drastically.

It wouldn’t change literally everything. The Sun and the Earth will continue to orbit around a shared barycenter. Humans will continue to breath oxygen. Carbon will continue to form four covalent bonds per atom. Some boys will continue to think a lot about some girls, etc etc.

[jraph]

Yep, I meant this indeed.