Hello everyone,I'm having trouble with the public registration feature in LimeSurvey (Version 6.16.13+260316).Setup:

•  Survey is active with a participant table initialized (Closed Access).
• "Allow public registration" is set to Yes
• "Anonymized responses" is set to NO.
• I am testing in Incognito/Private mode to avoid session issues.
• Theme: Extended "Fruity TwentyThree"

The Issue:
When accessing the survey URL without a token, I am redirected to the standard welcome page instead of the registration form. Adding ?register=true to the URL doesn't help either.Furthermore, the fields for "Registration welcome/confirmation" are missing in the "Text elements" section, even though public registration is enabled and saved in the participant settings.
 Is there a known bug in recent 6.x versions regarding the registration routing or a global setting that might override the survey-specific registration setting?Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Checked with last version : seems OK.

You can import a sample LSA file for testing ?

Thank you for your suggestion! Could you upload a sample LSA file, so I can test it on my server?


Update to what I found out in the meantime:

I did some debugging today and wanted to share the results.

I modified the welcome.twig to dump the internal variables and check what the controller actually passes to the view. I added this:
Registration allowed: {{ aSurveyInfo.bAllowRegister ? 'YES' : 'NO' }}

The result is NO.
The PHP backend strictly sets bAllowRegister to false, completely ignoring the UI settings.

Here is what I completely ruled out so far (the checklist of things I tried to force it to true):

Global vs. Survey Settings: "Allow public registration" is set to a hard "ON" in both the global survey settings and the specific survey participant settings (not inherited).

Survey Status: The survey is fully activated. The participant table exists and is active. I even wiped the table completely and rebuilt it from scratch ("Start from scratch" / "Neu beginnen").

Session/Admin Issues: Tested on a completely different device (Smartphone via mobile data) to ensure no admin session or cookies interfere.

Dates: There is no start or expiration date set that could block access.

Captchas & Emails: Disabled Captcha completely. Toggled the "Use email confirmation for registration" setting on and off.

Anonymized responses: Set to NO.

Forced HTTPS: Turned it on globally, didn't change the outcome.

Despite all this, the system refuses to set bAllowRegister = true. Has anyone ever experienced the database not syncing with the UI here, or is there a known controller bug in 6.16.13 that overrides the registration variable? Any pointers on which core file sets this boolean would be highly appreciated!

Thank you for your suggestion. Could you upload a sample LSA file, so I can test it on my server?

Update:

I did some debugging and wanted to share the results, because this really seems like a core bug in version 6.16.x.

I modified the welcome.twig to dump the internal variables and check what the controller actually passes to the view. I added this:
Registration allowed: {{ aSurveyInfo.bAllowRegister ? 'YES' : 'NO' }}

The result is NO.
The PHP backend strictly sets bAllowRegister to false, completely ignoring the UI settings.

Here is what I completely ruled out so far (the checklist of things I tried to force it to true):

Global vs. Survey Settings: "Allow public registration" is set to a hard "ON" in both the global survey settings and the specific survey participant settings (not inherited).

Survey Status: The survey is fully activated. The participant table exists and is active. I even wiped the table completely and rebuilt it from scratch ("Start from scratch" / "Neu beginnen").

Session/Admin Issues: Tested on a completely different device (Smartphone via mobile data) to ensure no admin session or cookies interfere.

Dates: There is no start or expiration date set that could block access.

Captchas & Emails: Disabled Captcha completely. Toggled the "Use email confirmation for registration" setting on and off.

Anonymized responses: Set to NO.

Forced HTTPS: Turned it on globally, didn't change the outcome.

Despite all this, the system refuses to set bAllowRegister = true. 

Can you check what you had in your DB about allowregister in surveys table and surveys_groupsettings  ?

Can you test too with the vanilla theme?

Theme: Extended "Fruity TwentyThree"

Test with a standard theme that has not been modified and see if the error persists.

So I tried to follow your suggestion:

What I did:
- I created a completely new test survey with default values.
- Initially, I used the Vanilla theme.
- I went to Participant Settings and changed "Allow public registration" from "Inherit (On)" to a hard "On". -> The registration page appeared.
- I then switched the test survey to my custom modified theme, and it still works perfectly. This proves that the theme is NOT the issue.

I double-checked every single setting in my actual survey. On the surface, the settings are identical to the working test survey, but the actual survey still refuses to show the registration page (it redirects to the welcome page and my debug output still shows aSurveyInfo.bAllowRegister = false).

I have attached the .lss files for both:
test_survey_working.lss (Registration works here)
original_survey_broken.lss (Registration fails here)

Thank you so much for your support!

- I then switched the test survey to my custom modified theme, and it still works perfectly. This proves that the theme is NOT the issue.

Not necessarily, because you switched from one theme to the other. So this could have helped. But I agree that the likelyhood that it is with the theme is lower now.

I have imported the "broken" survey and activated it here and it works just fine. The registration page opens without any issues.

What happens if you import the broken survey as a new survey?