Best of luck with your search!

First off, love your site – been reading it for years, since I put up my first WordPress site back in 2007-ish.

Secondly, thanks for including SurveyGizmo on your list! We only just now stumbled onto it, and we’re thrilled to see ourselves mentioned here! If you get a moment, we wanted to see if you’d maybe update the link to our plugin’s new location.

Since this post, we’ve made some major changes to the plugin, and would love it if your readers stumbled onto the most recent version. (& we’re working on a few big changes that should be live soon).

Thanks!

Though, WP Simple Survey came quite close, this is what I am in need of. Any thoughts, recommendations, etc. are greatly appreciated:

#1) I have ten (10) questions and each with four (4) answers

#2) Each answer has a numeric worth (e.g.; answer 1= 10pts., answer 2= 5pts. and so forth)

#3) In this example, let’s say the the reader chose “answer 1″ for each question. This will give him/her a score of “100.”

#4) After reader completes the questions, he/she will click submit or “get score” button. I would need the plugin to then:

a) Calculate/add-up the variables or points per answer
b) Direct the reader to a designated URL for readers who score 100

That’s it.

Again, I thank you for your time and response in advance.
Take Care,

-R

So… WordPress Simple Survey does almost exactly what I want, but the problem is with how the answers are weighted. And example of what I want in a plugin (should such a plugin exist!):

Question 1? (multiple choice — only one can be chose)
Answer a (given the variable X)
Answer b (given the variable Y)
Answer c (given the variable Z)

Question 2? (multiple choice — only one can be chose)
Answer d (given the variable X)
Answer e (given the variable Y)
Answer f (given the variable Z)

Question 3? (multiple choice — only one can be chose)
Answer g (given the variable X)
Answer h (given the variable Y)
Answer i (given the variable Z)

Then, when the visitor is done filling out the form, they click on submit (or somesuch), and the plugin will have aggregated how many x’s, how many y’s, and how many z’s. So let’s say there were two x’s and one z, the plugin would either produce text that says, “Your ideal is X!” or direct the visitor to a URL that has been attached to variable X.

So, while I know that polls/surveys are weighted, I don’t want how WordPress Simple Survey weights answers (0 to 99). I mean, if I were only ever going to use three possible “endings,” then I’m sure I could come up with a way to make the numbers calculate out to work for me. But adding in even one or two more possible “endings” would create a calculation nightmare.

I looked at the links you provided (thank you!), but he main problem is that I’m not interested in aggregating TOTAL results for all visitors — I want to aggregate the individual’s answers to find the result that best suited for them.

I guess what I want is the ability to ask multiple polls, take those poll results and aggregate them to spit out a URL or answer that best suits the visitor. Am I asking too much??

Beyond WordPress Plugins, there are Google Docs Forms, JavaScript and jQuery scripts that might be helpful if you know a bit of code, though they might not auto post the winner or direct the visitor to the winner. Most Plugins “announce” winners and the score automatically, but it sounds like you want more. There are Plugins that will do “star” ratings to let readers vote up or down their favorite post, featuring the “score” in a sidebar widget for all to see, and you can create a post for each of your heros and have readers vote on them, thus the winner would have the most votes, but you’d have to manually promote them – which is actually better. Such efforts always do better when the author is pushing them from behind instead of having it be automatic.

WP-Polls is highly customizable and very flexible, as is PollDaddy, especially the pro version.

Competition and Contest Plugins might also help such as PhotoContest Plugin WordPress Plugin and Competition Manager WordPress Plugin, and I think there are some premium Plugins that will also help you do competitions like something called contest burner or a name like that. I’ve never tried it.

Honestly, I recommend a star rating Plugin if they will be adding more to the list and not focusing on a specific group of heroes at a time.

If you want a good example of a highly successful romance writer hero contest, check out The Challenges of Creating an Interactive Blog by Rachelle Chase.

I have been searching for a slightly different type of survey plugin, however, and have been coming up dry. I like the functionality of WordPress Simple Survey (even though I can only create one survey to keep it free), but instead of using a weighted system, I want a plugin that will assign a value to an answer, tally up the number of answers for each value, and show a result based on the value that showed up the most. I do websites for romance authors; I’ll give you an example. One of my authors wants to do a “who is your perfect hero” survey, and the result will be one of three of the heroes in her latest novels. Let’s call them Hero A, Hero B, and Hero C.

So let’s say there are five questions in the survey, with three multiple choice possibilities for each. Each multiple choice answer has one of the Heroes attached to it. So a person takes the survey, and the results end up that Hero A got 2 answers, Hero B got 3, and Hero C (poor guy) got 0. I want, then, for the plugin to recognize that Hero B got the most answers, and show the Hero B page as the result. I really hope that made sense!

If I were only doing three heroes and never expanding, then I am sure I could come up with a way to make the weighted system work the way it is. But my client will want to gradually add in all the heroes from her HUGE backlist of books… and that could create a huge headache for re-organizing the results! Do you have any ideas of good plugins? Seems to be that it would be almost like a combination of a voting plugin and survey plugin, yes? Thoughts? THANK YOU for ALL that you do for wordpress users!!