[thelist] Online poll issues

[dan donaldson]

On Wednesday, April 3, 2002, at 09:06 AM, Josh wrote:

> Yes, but now my question has changed to how do I use it,
>
> How do I, with ASP, use a NT login to reach a web page and keep track of
> the username that they enter?

Does this mean that you intend to track each user's responses separately
in association with a non-anonymous key?

If so, store the key data in a db and if a response comes in that is a
duplicate key, then toss the new data out, or (if that's your policy)
replace the previous record.

Having built/run an online survey system I can tell you though that very
different issues come up when you start storing 'survey' data as
non-anonymous information. Part of why some surveys work is because they
allow the user to answer with a reasonable assurance of anonymity. You
might want to 'anonymize' the users by storing the data in one db with
an index number, and have a separate db that stores the keys. Then,
check the key in the second db, if it validates, store the key in the
second db and the data in the first. Don't associate the two records.

How you determine if the key is an existing, valid one is another
problem.

Of course, I could have misunderstood the question.... if so, please
mark this as a zero given a range of one to five where five means
understood perfectly and one means didn't understand it at all...

;-)

dan