Hello,

We are running a non-anonymized survey (therefore, the completion date is stored in the Participants tab). However, when I export the answers (in CSV or other formats), only the dummy date (1980-01-01) is present. Is this a bug or did I miss something ?

Thanks in advance,
Mathieu

LimeSurvey version: Version 3.27.0+210525

Did you set the datestamp to be collected?

Notifications & data --> Date Stamp - www.limesurvey.org/manual/Notifications_%26_data#Date_Stamp

The setting is disabled but I can't enable it (it says " Responses will not be date stamped. Cannot be changed ").

You can't change that while the survey is active, I think.

OK... Is it possible to deactivate and reactivate a survey ?

Deactivating causes the data to be removed. Always download the data before deactivating so you can merge it later.

Sorry for the newbie question. Is there a guide for that ?

Or maybe I can simply change some settings directly the DB.

As Tpartner says, export the data you collected so far, to be safe (ideally in the format you will want it later for analysis). This is just to make sure if something goes wrong, you still have the data you collected so far. Merging two data files later is relatively simple.

Then you can deactivate the survey, change your settings and then reactivate your survey. Usually, you should be asked if you want to import the old data again.

But I you most probably won't have the date for those that have answered up to this day. Only from now onwards.

Thanks. If I understand the export options, the LSA format is the best suited for that.

No, export the data not the survey.

LSA exports both, the survey structure plus the answers. It is good to have this as backup, just in case.

However, you should also export the data as CSV for example. In the rare case that you are not able to "un-archive" the date when reactivating the survey, you have the survey data as CSV up to the moment of the deactivation.

Later you just export the rest and bring the data sets together into one. Easy peasy.

Thanks. I was able to deactivate the survey, change the setting, reactivate the survey and import results.

The only glitch is that the response IDs are not conserved (the new ones are follows the old ones).