For a work project, we wanted to have our staff in Asia fill out a Web-based survey and then have a "survey engine" automatically record and tally up all the answers and display the results using bar charts on-the-fly.

So I did many hours of research, sifting through the more than 150 Perl- and PHP-based scripts in the Polls and Voting category at HotScripts.com. Many sounded good but had dead links. Many were missing key features we needed, like the ability to accept text (e.g. name, email, and comments) and an "Other" answer text field (in addition to radio, checkbox, multiple choice, and true/false type answers). I also wanted one that prevented multiple submissions by using browser cookies (not by just IP which I think would be problematic for those behind firewalls). It also had to be free or cheap and not require a backend database (e.g. MySQL) which would make things complicated and be overkill.

EventHandler by the funny-sounding UbiDog Productions turned out to be the star. Instructions and documentation are excellent but I still managed to run into problems getting everything to work. Before I went to bed last night, I posted my problem on UbiDog's online support forum and this morning I got a helpful reply. Incredible — excellent free support for free software! The details of my fix are in the forum, but basically, I got the scripts working this morning.

By this evening, I had fully configured the system, created and fine-tuned our survey, did multiple tests, and customized the template file which defines the design and layout of the pages. So now I have a functionally-rich Web survey system that looks very professional and is free. UbiDog has a US$100 "Pro" version which adds a TON of additional features. I'm hoping to convince our management to purchase the Pro license — the UbiDog folks certainly deserve it! Heck, the time that EventHandler saves us from having to manually tally up and tabulate the answers is worth several times the price.

In short, I highly recommend EventHandler for conducting online surveys. I'm quite sure it's best in its class.