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Your LimeSurvey version: 3.28.11+220517
Own server or LimeSurvey hosting: self-hosted at surveys.lpi.org
Survey theme/template: custom
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Hello,

I am a non-admin user who is creating surveys for our organization. (switched from SurveyMonkey where I created many surveys)
I am looking for a way to enable the "preview" function to people without a Lime account.
I want to be able to give them a private link to a test version of the survey before it is activated.
In my perfect scenario they would be able to leave comments inline, but I would be satisfied if they could just see the survey and convey their comments by email or other means.
Right now if I just send them the Preview URL before activation they respond that it doesn't work for them.
Is there a way that I can adjust permissions such that non-account-holders are able to preview a survey the way I can?
Giving all the reviewers accounts is not a viable option because our surveys are targeted at different audiences.
Right now my temporary solution is to print out screenshots to PDF and send them.

As a non-admin I don't have access to Settings but the site admin will implement any reasonable change in the site to enable this.
Right now, my inability to invite outside reviewers to the survey before activation is Lime's only deficiency compared to SurveyMonkey, otherwise I am very happy with LimeSurvey.

Thank you for any help!

1) Simply activate the survey for testing. You can deactivate/activate as many times as you like.

2) Global settings --> Security --> "Survey preview only for administration users" - www.limesurvey.org/manual/Global_settings/en#Security

evanleibovitch wrote:

In my perfect scenario they would be able to leave comments inline, but I would be satisfied if they could just see the survey and convey their comments by email or other means.
 

Feel free to support and comment  my feature request from 2010
Test and Comment Modus bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=7407

What was the main reason for switching from SurveyMonkey to LimeSurvey?

tpartner wrote:

1) Simply activate the survey for testing. You can deactivate/activate as many times as you like.
 

I would recommend to make a copy form the survey and activate that copy. LimeSurvey does not allow that many changes once you activate a survey. That is different from other surveytools.
Other survey tools have a preview mode for external users, where the survey stays non accessible to the public.
To do that in LimeSurvey, you can generate a participants list with dummy tokens to provide testlinks to external users while keeping the survey non accessible to the public,

 

What I do in these cases is adding an open textfield at the bottom of each page for feedback. Later you can change this question to "remarks about the page" or make it invisible. Of course this is only valid when you use the page by page mode of the survey.

I've read and bumped the feature request.

What was the main reason for switching from SurveyMonkey to LimeSurvey?

More than one reason.

1. Lime's multilingual handling is far superior. SM really doesn't really do it at all, so that bar is low
   
   ; there we've had to do duplicate surveys in each language and aggregate the results manually. Not fun. (Maybe there was a better way, but SM was no help in suggesting one.)
   
2. SM's single-user account forces you to designate the only two devices from which you may log in. This is an AWFUL restriction for me as I travel and often need to use remote systems to access the cloud. Or if I dual-boot Windows and Linux from a single PC, that uses up both slots. Insane.
   
3. Plus, we really wanted to have multiple users, and even with the nonprofit discount SM's prices were deal-breakers.
   
4. Since we already host a number of other cloud services (Mattermost, Nextcloud, BigBlueButton), the incremental cost of hosting an installation of Lime was low.
   
5. Our org naturally prefers open source solutions if they are up to the task

I'm still making my way around Lime and have not yet come near exploiting the reporting features. A few things are done differently but have been no real obstacles. The only real issue I had was the one in this thread, which has been solved by turning off that admin switch. So far I really like what I see,

The only other SM feature that I I used but haven't seen in Lime is the ability to have multiple "collector"  URLs pointing to the same survey ... so we can track which entries came from the website, which came from the email campaign, which came from the Facebook post, etc. Maybe there's a way to duplicate that in Lime but I haven't checked out that part yet.

The only other SM feature that I I used but haven't seen in Lime is the ability to have multiple "collector" URLs pointing to the same survey ... so we can track which entries came from the website, which came from the email campaign, which came from the Facebook post, etc. Maybe there's a way to duplicate that in Lime but I haven't checked out that part yet.

You can create those "multiple collector URLs" on your own. Two options come to mind:
1. add a variable to the survey URL and read it into a hidden text question (e.g. via the "panel integration" feature)
2. use token based surveys with a very high "uses left" value

Collector types and options are bit different, since you can apply different options depending on the way people get to your survey.
help.surveymonkey.com/en/send/collector-options/
help.surveymonkey.com/en/send/sending-your-survey/

You can implement most of the relevant things in LimeSurvey as well, as long as it isn't a surveysetting (e.g. anonymous for one group and IP saved for another group).