Hello everyone,
I consider myself a peripheral member of this community for about ten years (supervisor of the Italian translations and contributor of the local forum) and I wanted to refer to some considerations that ninaviz wrote in a confusing and also offensive way, but which could be a new important starting point for the project.
The first reflection is on the release of version 4, without major visible improvements compared to version 3 and with the known problems of stability and above all of communication of the instability of the downloadable version. Unfortunately someone, especially outside the community, might think it was done to test the version. Perhaps the new version needed to be more shared in the community. I had the perception of something from above, and perhaps at that moment (and even now) it was more important to consolidate and make version 3 more usable.
The second point concerns the new limesurvey.org site, built a few weeks after the disaster of version 4. I think a lot of people in the community were quite impressed by suddenly finding themselves in front of a bearded testimonial inviting to subscribe to an easy tool for making web surveys. I think I'm not only that it appeared to me as a clumsy ape of well-known SaaS tools.
But I don't want to criticize commercial or communication choices. Rather I would like to share my recent experience with Matomo. Matomo is an open source web-analyzer software. It is possible to download and install it on your own servers (Matomo On-Premise), and it is offered alsa as SaaS (Matomo Cloud). For the On-premise version it is possible to purchase plug-ins (annual subscription...), aimed mostly at users who are not very technical and easy to use. On Matomo homepage you can find the 2 solutions at the same level.
I am not an expert programmer, but I think that with the heritage of APIs and interfaces of the current LimeSurvey it should not be very difficult to create plugins to facilitate the construction of a questionnaire, the definition of expressions, the choice of question types and themes. Not to mention plugins to allow more advanced features such as the selective monitoring of respondents or the "relational" management of "multiple sections" (e.g. Census).
I think everyone would benefit from an offer similar to that of Matomo: LimeSurvey GmbH could expand its SaaS offering with these components and lowering the software learning threshold, and LimeSurvey platform managers like me could purchase these additional plugins to allow surveys to be carried out by their colleagues in greater autonomy.
Sorry if I've been a bit long.

Luciano

Totally OK with this.
And : already make a lot of bug report about 4./X version usuabilty …

At the exception of one things

without major visible improvements compared to version 3 and with the known problems of stability

There are great improvments … great feature :
- Separate i10n table : it's really something we need to do for year
- Stats function inside Expression available (by plugins), asked for years
- Crypt data (i'm upset about the security here, but it exist …)
- inherit system (it's a starting point, but it can be great)
- …

It's the biggest reason i'm terribly dispaoointed of usuabilty of question editor : this didn't improve anything but broke a lot …

Hey there and thanks for feedback! We are aware that many users share your feelings. Great features were introduced in LS4, yes, but the communication could have been better (many lessons learned).

We will focus on that more in the near future and try to include the community more into LS testing before releasing a big upgrade/major update.

I hope we can inform the community soon about what we plan to do in the future - now, our resources go into increasing the stability of LimeSurvey 4. Version 4.4 will be quite big