Good day, my fellow LimeSurvey Community folks!
I find the functionality of the search function on our support forum a bit limited and didn't have much luck, even though I'm sure there are already tons of threads regarding the question I'm asking. So, links to any earlier relevant threads are appreciated, as well as direct answers!
So, I'm just starting out with LimeSurvey and am having trouble with working out the
anonymity functionality of surveys, and I couldn't extract the information in an understandable way from the basic documentation either, nor by using google search.
So, I have designed a
basic three-page survey (on a self-hosted LimeSurvey 2.63.1) which is supposed to be
closed-access and
anonymous. I can create new participants using the normal Survey → Participants functionality. I want to use e-mail addresses as a sort of “unique identifier” for participants (quote marks meaning: I don't care if they work as an actual UId in a database management sense), so that I can send the invitations to selected participants by e-mail, preferably via the LimeSurvey's integrated invitation system.
But, I've been having problems during initial testing. First off, the system doesn't seem to want to sent invitations to participants without creating a “token” first. That's all right as such, I mean, database management and so on. But the real problem comes when I, as an admin, can browse a list of participants, see their e-mail addresses and tokens next to each other on a table, and
even see if a particular participant has already answered the survey.
I mean, where's the
real anonymity if I can see that participant
Svenne Pettersson at
svenne.pettersson@mycompany.org has already completed the survey, and it just so happens that “Svenne” is the first and only person who's completed it, so all the statistics and such I can see in the system concerning this particular survey
must point to poor old Svenne, who thought he was participating anonymously? Am I missing something critical here? Any insight or tips are
greatly appreciated!
Also, I have a
bonus question if anyone is willing to be helpful, regarding
good survey design practice in LimeSurvey:
I have a survey whose questions need to be of a
5-point single choice type. Problem is, because of backwards compatibility with earlier data, the scoring needs to be [0...4], with an additional "No answer" option. — The simplest way I found to implement a 5-point scale with values rom 0 to 4 was to use an
array with a single subquestion, with labels and values from 0 to 4. It feels a bit akward, though, to use an array here, so if any of you might have a better idea of how this might be done, I'd really appreciate it if you dropped me a note here!
Thank you a lot, I know time and focused attention are precious commodities to invest on answering support community forum questions, so receiving a reply feels truly generous.
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