Is such a thing even possible?

We have a survey that has been running for 4 months now, with exactly 41 full responses in each month.

The numbers of invitations vary, and so does the number of incomplete forms.

This is a simple 1 page survey, with everything displayed on that one page.

My fear is that somewhere at the beginning I tested an option, and it created this limit.

Can anyone please point me to possible directions? I do not think that this is a topic for a bug, as it is most probably the result of a setting.

Thank you!

I'm not aware of a setting inside LimeSurvey. Many of us would be happy to have such a limit setting

What version of LimeSurvey is used? Is the survey using tokens?

Is this self hosted or a SaaS, for example from Limesurvey Pro?

Otherwise: Like Jelo. I would love to have such a limit, but there is no option in Limesurvey.

You could do a test and fill more than 41 interviews in a given month and see what happens when you reach the 41 participants limit. Just note down which responses are yours for the testing.

Thank you all for your replies!

This is a self hosted 2.73.0+171219 version. I tried upgrading to 3.x but it completely broke my skins so this will have to wait.

Every week we send invitations with tokens to participants, and in the last month I added myself in the last line of the participants file, in order to see that I am getting the invitation - which I did.

The weirdest thing is that when I fill-in the survey after the 41st respondent, I have no problem, no error message or notification, and there are now 42 respondents that filled-in the survey.

But getting exactly 41 responses each month - 4 months in a row - is just too much to be a coincidence.

BTW, the respondents may be the same from one month to the other. What I do in order to limit them to a monthly reply is:
- Use a unique ID column in the respondents file as the 'token' column
- Add 'YYYYMM' to the end of the ID

So for example ID '0038000001lveEu' becomes the token '0038000001lveEu201803' in March 2018, and then '0038000001lveEu201804' in April, and thus can get a monthly invite.

The tokens are being imported fully and correctly, including the leading zeros.

Does it ring any Lime bells?

I would say it's a coincidence, weirder things have happened in history
Hopefully next month the numbers are different for you.

Indeed.

I will update the thread next month.

If you can fill in the form to get to 42, I don't think that there is any limit set.

You most probably have exactly 41 people in your sample that are willing to respond. Have you checked if it is always the same tokens responding? With your token system you can make a timeline. If I would have to guess, you'll see that each month exactly the same people respond. That is actually not to suprising, if you always ask the same people.

holch wrote: You most probably have exactly 41 people in your sample that are willing to respond.

That is an interesting theory!

I checked it, and while there are quite a few repeating respondents, the majority are unique.

OK, then we can rule this out. Everything ruled out brings us closer to the real issue. But as you could go further than 41, I assume you just have been very "lucky". I would find it strange as well and would do some research, but from all evidence that you presented so far, I would say the best explanation is "chance".

On other thing: how big is the total universe of respondents? 50? 100? 200? 1000?

Every month we send invitations to about 70 people.

The survey started on January, and up until now we invited 1,177 people, and received 41 responses each month.

Let me get this right: Each month you send invites to 70 different people. OK. How do you get to 1177 people then? January to May are 5 months. 5x 70 isn't anywhere near 1177...

Sorry, Holch, I don't know how I got to the number 70...

Over the 4 months we sent 1,177 invitations. Each invitation is, naturally, to a unique token.

This averages to around 300 invitations per month. Or to be more accurate:
January - 250
February - 300
March - 313
April - 314

We are already in mid-May, so it will not take long to see if anything changes.

It's an interesting case. I also would be wondering what is going on. But of course we would expect some differences over the 4 months. So I think it is good to keep an eye on this. Keep us updated on how it is going. We already have excluded that Limesurvey is posing any limit, because you were able to fill additional questions there. If you get exactly 41 responses again, then we really should dig deeper (how the invitations are sent, do all respondents receive the invitations, etc.).