Hi,

We need to create a multiple-choice question competition for our employees. The competition will start a specific time and everyone is supposed to start and end at a specific time.
Example: The competition will have 12 multiple-choice questions and each question has a timer of 10 seconds. The competition is supposed to start at 12:40 pm and end at 12:42 pm. At each question, the time limit is 10 seconds and it moves automatically to the next question. If somebody opens the link at 12:41 pm, they should be able to start from that specific question as others and not from beginning.

Can this be done by Lime Survey CE?

Thanks.

syedcic wrote: Can this be done by Lime Survey CE?

Your idea will not work in any webbased tool cause the amount of time to load a page has to be considered as well. Such a realtime survey (skipping questions synchronized in time) is problematic over the network. 10 seconds per question on a slow connection can result into entering a survey and being skipped to the end without ever being able to answer a question.

Hi, Thanks for your reply.
It is to be conducted on the intranet network and we will ask the users to keep the page open by 12:35pm.

Please report back, how you conduct the competition in the end.

If you look at the technical layers to let browser and webserver interact, you will see all kinds of issues, which let a realtime survey not work as reliable as needed.


In LimeSurvey you can limit start and end time of a survey.
But a question time should only start, once the browser has completed loading and is really showing the webpage. Not every browser on every device is displaying the page with the same speed (Updates in the background, different amount of free memory etc.). So you cannot use the timer of the page. You want to enforce a strict timetable. You know the exact timetable of every question to be displayed and to vanished.
But to enforce loading the next question you need a browser action (timecountdown).

To get that done, you will need the complete survey loaded at once and displayed via a Javascript routine to enforce timing. You will need to let people load the survey a few minutes before the start to ensure everybody has the survey ready for the starttime. The onepage displaymode of LimeSurvey looks not capable enough to hide parts on time without workarounds.
Out of the box LimeSurvey should not be considered for that kind of survey. So if you don't want to invest additional time/money in workarounds, you might look elsewhere first.