Hi, I'm a French engineer working in CNRS, La Rochelle, France.


I have put online a survey in order to allow 5 persons to record the answers of a survey that was initialy made by post mail. I have thus configured the limesurvey on MySQL on a server, for a private survey, and 5 persons were given a different invitation, each one with 3000 tokens.

The survey records the IP and the hour of the record, and the name of the person who made it (NOT anonymous). Cookies are NOT activated so that each person can make many records. Links for answers are NOT persistent. It is allowed to record multiple answers or to update them. No public record.

Activer la persistance des liens réponses - invitations ? NON
Permettre les réponses multiples ou la mise à jour de ces réponses ? OUI
Permettre l'enregistrement public ? NON

• Les réponses de ce questionnaire ne sont PAS anonymes.
• Présentation sur une page unique.
• Aucun index de questions n'apparaîtra pour ce format.
• Les réponses seront datées
• Les adresses IP seront enregistrées
• L'URL de provenance sera enregistrée.
• Les participants peuvent sauvegarder un questionnaire partiellement complété

Up to now, one person recorded 500 answers without any problem. But today, a second person has arrived in her office, and there is a problem.

It seems that two 2 persons having the same IP address can not save their answers into LimeSurvey.

It is very URGENT to solve this problem, since 2 of them that are located in the same office can not work. and soonly it will be 5 persons that won't be able to work.

Here are production parameters of my server hosting LimeSurvey :

Serveur de base de données
Type de serveur : MySQL
Version du serveur : 5.1.73 - Source distribution
Version du protocole : 10
Jeu de caractères du serveur : UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

Serveur web
Apache
Version du client de base de données : libmysql - 5.1.73

Php : PhpMyAdmin : 4.1.14.1

It is running on Linux Ubuntu. (LAMP)

Could you help me ?

This sounds strange because we use Limesurvey for data entry all the time.

What is the error that you get? What happens when the person is starting to do the data entry?

In fact, they see no error messages. But when they have checked the answers, one of the records was lost. They make the test twice this morning.

It seems to me incredible.

I've just re-ask them for make the same test this afternoon, and now, they say that both answers are well recorded, no problem... I'm aways from my office today. So I will return and see them tomorrow, in order to make the test with them.

I will give you more details at this time.

Thank you very much !

Hi,

Did you use a host with some specific $_SESSION configuration.

We only use $_SESSION for survey answer.

With LimeSUrvey : without persistence : you can open 2 browser with same token on the same computer.

The only way i see it it's something with $_SESSION.

Denis

To be honest (I don't know your guys), I have seen so much "It wasn't possible", "there was an error", "the server was down" from people contracted for data entry. Usually it turns out that at the end there was actually just one entry made, etc...

So you need to investigate this well with them, just to rule out problems on their end. Because at the end of the day, in my case there was never really a problem with limesurvey not recording the answers, there was usually some other explanation for it.

Which is why I usually give individual links (with token to the data entry people). Especially as you can go back into the survey.

I just generate a list of dummy tokens and dummy token links (i have made a how to in the manual a while ago).

The used token will be noted onto the paper questionnaire, so you can actually follow those things and get more information about it.

$_SESSION on server side, in PHP.ini settings ?
I didn't touched those settings. It's a standard LAMP installation, provided by CNRS DSI, and I didn't touch any config parameters of PHP nor MySQL.

Christine

Hi, by the way, it's exactly what I've done (individual tokens).

Each guy has its token, and I can see in records who made what.

To be honest too, I would really prefer that it is just a mistake from their part, and as I said, I will be with them tomorrow afternoon to make the test, and check if all is OK. I really hope that it is just the new guy who has misunderstood something...

Well, of course it can be a technical problem, we can never exclude that option.

I am just saying, that from my experience the error usually lies with the data entry people. This might be totally different for your team. But "the new guy" sounds like about right...

What I do is not given one token to each of them, but a list with one token per questionnaire that needs to be typed. So I have the token as an individual code on each paper questionnaire and I know who received which tokens. So at the end of the day it is also easier to identify which paper questionnaire was with a problem, not completed, etc.