Survey multiple submissions

Administrators
1

Hi folks,
before starting the development for my previous topic, there is something else I stumbled accross (and that might be easier to start with :slight_smile: ):

Is it possible to allow users to finish a survey several times? I did not find this option in the settings and even if I put the survey on “anonymous”, I still can not take part another time before deleting the cache of my browser. ( I guess this is not a bug but a feature :slight_smile: )
1.) Has anyone had a simmilar problem and found a workaround?

If not, please move this topic to development and here already are some questions on this:
I took a look in the database and I guess multiple submissions would be possible without deep changes to the database. Just another flag for each survey that defins if multiple answers are allowed. And in the code we need to add another “if”, that turns the check if someone already took part on or off.

2.) Is there something I do not see what would make this more complex?
3.) If I (or someone else) would get this to work smothly: Are you interested in including this in one of the next releases? I would prefer not to make this adjustment in every new update :slight_smile:

Jonas

2

No, that’s not intended. Usually you don’t want the same user to submit a survey more than once.
I’m curious, what use-case do you have where you want to allow multiple submission of a survey?

We store in the session which surveys you completed (save_submitted_survey_to_session).
So using an incognito tab will let you submit an anonymous survey multiple times )unless it requires you to be logged in).

3

Several ideas:

  • Before deciding for a program outline, we want to ask “the crowd” for current topics that will be the tracks of the conference
  • During the conference we have to make a decission on a poster award. So there is a jury that is asked to review several posters.
  • After the conference we are asking for their opinion on what should be different. The more submissions, the better and restricting them to just one submission or letting them edit the old one is not what is needed here.

Our current use-case is the second one, but also the others will become important to us. I’ll sent you a private message, maybe this is something we could implement in the future?

4

I don’t see why this needs multiple submissions…

  1. A single survey should cover this. If you want feedback on multiple areas it’d be best to include them all in that survey.
  2. You could add multipe-choice field to the survey where more than one option can be selected.
  3. I think in such a case you want many people to answer your survey. That’s indeed better than only a few submissions (but people are lazy so many won’t submit one anyway). But by not having any restrictions on multiple submissions, you might get 10 submissions from the same user. If you are lucky they are all the same and 9 of them can be disregarded, but if it’s something who wants to troll or really make you think his opinion is that of many, the submissions might be different enough so it’s not clear they come from the same user…
5

But if someone already submitted his survey and he recalls another shortcoming, he can not let us know about it

In previous years we used a special survey tool for this and added a survey that looked like the following:
Poster ID:
Rating:
We set this survey to private and sent it to all judges and they provided the rating for all the posters they were asked for. As there will be hundrets of poster, we do not want to make a survey for each poster.

If the option could be turned of, I do not think any community member would mind having the option. But we would like to make sure that this does not limit future developments.

6

OK, that is a valid point. I think the most common solution at the moment is to open the survey only after the event has finished.

I wonder of some kind of contact form (instead / in addition to the “organizer email” we already show if one is set) where people can just submit a short free-style message wouldn’t be better for such a use case.

This sounds like a usecase for a generic reviewing module (which doesn’t exist)… unfortunately both Call for Abstracts and Call for Papers don’t seem to be exactly what you need here. But the survey module doesn’t sound amazing for it either…