Website feedback

Website pages can be configured to display forms that solicit feedback from visitors, for example asking whether or not page information was useful and accurate.

User-submitted feedback is stored in the Django database. There are several ways to access and export this data.

Exporting feedback using Wagtail

Users with appropriate permissions have access to an "Export feedback" tool in Wagtail. This tool generates a ZIP file containing submitted feedback between two user-specified dates.

Screenshot of the Wagtail tool for exporting feedback

Feedback is automatically grouped into three segments, each stored as a CSV:

  • Feedback submitted on Ask CFPB pages (both English and Spanish)
  • Feedback submitted on Buying a House pages
  • Feedback submitted on all other website pages

In order to access this part of the Wagtail admin, users must be granted the "Can export feedback from the Wagtail admin" permission. This can be enabled or disabled for different Wagtail groups in the Groups area of the admin.

Exporting feedback from the command line

For more control over what feedback to export, the export_feedback Django management command can be used. This command generates a CSV file containing feedback for a specified set of pages and/or dates.

To export all website feedback for all time, use this command:

cfgov/manage.py export_feedback --filename output.csv

(Alternatively, exclude the --filename parameter to send the output to the console.)

To export feedback for a specific Wagtail page and its descendants, provide its slug. Specified pages must have slugs that are unique across the website.

cfgov/manage.py export_feedback ask-cfpb --filename ask_cfpb.csv

Specify multiple slugs to export feedback for multiple pages:

cfgov/manage.py export_feedback ask-cfpb owning-a-home --filename ask_and_bah.csv

To invert the selection, and export feedback for all pages except those specified, use the --exclude parameter:

cfgov/manage.py export_feedback --exclude ask-cfpb --filename everything_except_ask.csv

To limit the exported feedback within a given date range, provide the --from-date and/or the --to-date parameters. These parameters are inclusive, meaning that feedback submitted on or between the dates is included in the export.

cfgov/manage.py export_feedback --from-date 2019-01-01 --to-date 2019-12-31 --filename 2019.csv

Querying feedback programmatically

For even greater control, feedback can be queried from a Python shell using the Feedback Django model.

This model includes a custom manager that exposes a for_pages method that can be used to efficiently query feedback for one or more pages and all of their descendants:

feedback = Feedback.objects.for_pages([page1, page2])

Like the management command, it can also be used to invert the selection:

feedback = Feedback.objects.for_pages([page], exclude=True)

This method can also be combined in the usual way with other standard Django queryset methods:

feedback = Feedback.objects.for_pages([page]).filter(language='es')