I have been on this forum for a few months now (on and off), and I have noticed 3 things:

- the same 5-10 workarounds get recommended time and again for a variety problem formulations.
- occasionally people wonder why such things are not among the main features
- some of the workarounds are really tutorials. Labeling them "workarounds" could be unfortunate from a marketing perspective: workarounds address application shortcomings while tutorials teach you how to us the awesome power the application has .

So my proposal would be to introduce new "commands" within the interface that would address the most popular needs people have but are not yet satisfied. Rather than pointing to features they would point to existing workarounds (a select group, probably). they would be called tutorials for the basic stuff and advanced tutorials where more complicated stuff (like coding) is required.

Example: Someone needs to program a differential semantic question. A semantic differential is essentially an array with labels on both left and right, but it is really hard to realize that unless you visit the forums.

So at question types one would see
"more question types"; on clicking that there would be a list of questions among which our user would happily find "semantic differential (tutorial)"

Naturally, the same tutorial, if well written, can apply to several issues. The workaround texts are already pretty well written, so no problem here.

Benefits:
users: quick way to address problems, without cluttering too much the interface

developers: less support on the forums for trivial questions (hopefully); you can still have a donate button with the tutorials

marketing: rather than putting people through the forum for each complex survey this approach could bring ease of use as a competitive advantage for LS (again, hopefully)

What do you guys think? I can propose this as an idea, but i thought i would get some feedback first.

Hello,

I think it's a good idea. Though I would use some information text(s) rather than a new option "more question types". For example you show a hint on the right side of the question type dropdown list saying "Didn't find what your're looking for? Have a look at our question type tutorials" where "tutorials" is a link to wiki-page/overview page on the LimeSurvey docs/wiki. In my opinion it doesn't make much sense to create an extra page in the LimeSurvey software that only shows links to the documentation because you can also use a wiki page as overview page. The benefit is that a wiki page can be changed/extended very easy while a static page in the LimeSurvey can't do this.
You can also use this information texts in other possible places, e.g. something like "You can do xy with the template editor".