Hi there,

Apologies for what may be a silly question but contained in the results coming from our open survey there are duplicate IP addresses. Is this just participants completing the survey in the same business (as per Joffm at  forums.limesurvey.org/forum/can-i-do-thi...nly-be-accessed-once )?

We are encouraging participants to use the 'Resume Later' feature if they don't have time to complete the survey in one sitting. Does this explain some of the duplicate IP addresses? Does the 'Resume Later' feature result in an incomplete survey response being stored until the participant returns and then another response (this time 'completed') is recorded in the results?

Thank you for your help.

Apologies for what may be a silly question but contained in the results coming from our open survey there are duplicate IP addresses. Is this just participants completing the survey in the same business (as per Joffm at forums.limesurvey.org/forum/can-i-do-thi...nly-be-accessed-once)?

No one can know this. I can be different people that are behind the same IP (same household, same company/organization) or it can be the same person responding more than once. Who knows?

We are encouraging participants to use the 'Resume Later' feature if they don't have time to complete the survey in one sitting. Does this explain some of the duplicate IP addresses? Does the 'Resume Later' feature result in an incomplete survey response being stored until the participant returns and then another response (this time 'completed') is recorded in the results?

Hmm, that would be an explanation, but in my opinion the entry should be incomplete until restarting and finishing. There should not be an incomplete and a complete. But I can't confirm this. Let's see if someone else has more insights in this behaviour.

But sometimes people start and don't finish. They might not use "resume later" and then start all over again.

But there are so many possible reasons for IPs appearing more than once...

Thank you very much @holch for your comprehensive answer. Pleased that there wasn't a straightforward answer.

holch wrote:

Hmm, that would be an explanation, but in my opinion the entry should be incomplete until restarting and finishing. There should not be an incomplete and a complete. But I can't confirm this. Let's see if someone else has more insights in this behaviour.

 

I confirm,
Except if there are a issue to be reported
It work like this in 3.X and surely in 5X

In my opinion you can have duplicated session when survey is without invite/token and cookie is not stored. But I haven't tested yet.
The client should open always a new session and "unsaved for later" response remains unaswered.

In my opinion, to be sure and without tokens, you should export response and evaluate separately (completed and uncompleted) then check IP addresses for duplicates.

But remember the IP hint, if clients are outside your network you'll endup with the same ip addresses for responses. If you're running the server inside the intranet you'll get internal ip addresses. LS does its best to detect IP also behind proxies.

Another important thing is to write inside privacy policy the statement you are collecting ip addresses as personal data. More reason if your participants are inside EU, you need GDPR compliance.