April 2020

26th of April 2020

Well the gaps between updates here are lengthening. That's partly because I've been rather busy with things including the project! With Clara Paz in Ecuador and Pablo Sabucedo in Spain we submitted a small but we think useful paper partly about this work but more generally about cv-19 and psychological therapies. The forms and related files continue to get downloaded, up to 2,227 this morning (https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/parse_logs3.html I've tweaked that and started charting the Spanish language downloads as well as the English). The bad/good/mixed news is that I have abandoned the Google forms. It was proving simply impossible to ensure that everyone asking for access followed the instructions to avoid the crazy design feature in Google forms that shares responses as well as forms. In the end only ten people asked for access and with eight they either never got round to using them (one) or they alone, or they and I, were able to sort things out so they were using them safely and I think some of those are continuing to use them. However, the risks and the time (and anxiety) it was costing me were too much to continue. Google have something quite good there in the forms themselves but the form sharing model is dire. Perhaps Microsoft are wise just not offering form sharing. No, that's sad! I am currently exploring LimeSurvey on my server again to see whether I think it is feasible for me to offer an account on the server as I remain concerned about the lack of confidentiality of fillable PDFs.

15th of April 2020

Hm. Eight days since my last update. The rather oddly placed graphs in the last update have been replaced by a log analysis of the downloads that updates daily: www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/parse_logs3.html. I'll add the Spanish forms to that in the next day or so as they start, we hope, to get downloaded. I've been holding off from updating as I've tried to sort out the mess with the Google forms. They have this, to me, extraordinary default which is that if you share a form with someone they get any responses in it. That's not so bad, what's extraordinary is that if they, or anyone else who has a copy of the form get responses, everyone who has the form gets the responses. There is a small and not 100% clear warning about this in Google's permission granting form and I missed it (I think I just couldn't believe they would have such a bizarre default). Anyway, that was my fault and I had to sort out the mess. The only way around it (Google where are your brains and data protection morals?) is for the person who has copied a form to immediately make their own copy of the form and delete the first one they copied. That does seem to break the sharing. The problem I have now is that some of the people I authorised early on are ignoring my Emails alerting them to this and not replying and at least one person continues to use the copied form and share responses. The Google system provides no way for me to identify the offending user. I have now deleted the form s/he was using and made a new copy. The other news is that the Spanish Google forms are available, despite my concerns about people not following the instructions with the Google forms: let's see if Spanish speakers do better than English speakers. We will shortly have the instructions in Spanish and we do now have the instructions for the PDFs in Spanish: https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/home/free-options-to-replace-paper-core-forms-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/fillable-pdf-forms-for-core-measures-2/. That's it for the last week!

7th of April

[Hm, that's a pretty crazy way to display things but just click on the images to see the plots] One step forward, two steps back?! The step forward is that, with vital help from Pablo Sabucedo, the Spanish fillable PDFs are available at https://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/home/free-options-to-replace-paper-core-forms-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/fillable-pdf-forms-for-core-measures/#SpanishFillablePDFs and the LimeSurvey forms for Spanish should be finished tomorrow. A slight step forward is that I noticed that the "Over the last week" wasn't clearly visible in some of the LimeSurvey forms and fixed that so if anyone is actually using them, I recommend updating with the new versions (same download links). Similarly, I noticed that a couple of CORE-OM items in the fillable PDFs though they had the scoring in the face of the forms, didn't have all the values in the internals of the PDFs so if anyone were using bulk scoring, which I haven't supported previously, they should update their PDFs. The two steps back are (1) discovering (thanks to someone giving feedback) that the Google forms create a shared responses spreadsheet so everyone can see everyone else's data. I have worked out how to fix that and notified the six people who had downloaded forms and (2) discovering that vimeo, which stores and feeds the "howto" screen videos for the google forms, is not showing any videos so I can't fix those! At the top, in rather a jumble, are files with the plots of the downloads by date for type (PDF, Qualtrics, LimeSurvey and coding spreadsheets), by measure (CORE-OM, CORE-10 and YP-CORE) and by PDF format (pulldown options or radio buttons) so far.

5th of April

No update yesterday as there wasn't much to add. Bit more today: Spanish fillable PDF forms now done (boy was that a pain: without the energy of the initial blitz to get the English forms up the tedious concentration you need to do it correctly was more of a grind!) They're with Pablo now to be checked and if, or once, they're OK, I'll do the Google forms (much easier to do than the PDFs) and perhaps LimeSurvey but not Qualtrics as we don't think it's much used in Spain or Latin America. I have taught myself to parse the server logs and can now say that up to 06:00 this morning (when my log files rotate), there had been a total of 1,098 of the files downloaded. 564 of the fillable PDFs and an absurdly high number of the various LimeSurvey files and about 50 each of the Libre/OpenOffice and Excel scoring spreadsheets for the Google forms. Given that only four people have asked for (and been given) access to the Google forms, I think this all tells us that a lot of these downloads aren't about real use of the files. However, I suspect this means that about 400 of the PDFs might be ones downloaded by users who might use them!

3rd of April update

No real developments to report: no specific feedback Emails, Spanish translation work continuing.

2nd of April update

Fillable PDF downloads continuing to climb, now three people have asked for access to Google forms. Spanish translations underway first for PDFs and probably Google forms and LimeSurvey (which I'm already using for research work in Spanish speaking countries). One report of fillable PDF form not working, waiting for clarification on that and one request for fillable CORE-A EoT which puzzled me but I think may be about workers in a service now working from home and the service wanting a way to continue to get the EoT data. Again, waiting for clarification. Rather surprised and relieved to have only one report of problems ... too early to get optimistic!

Update 1st of April (no fooling!)

Downloads climbing, mainly of the fillable PDFs. Do hope everyone is making sure clients know the confidentiality issues! Two people have asked for the necessary permission to use the Google forms. I've asked them if they will share experiences so I can perhaps make that easier. One enquiry about getting the forms available in Spanish and that's underway now and two request for the SCORE-15 in some online form so I'll try to do that when I have a moment. Perhaps to my surprise, no other communications. Perhaps that means that those downloading the fillable forms are happy and using them ... or just that it's too early! Very best all, Chris