I keep getting this PHP error in the backend when I go to "List Surveys" the page will not load and displays this huge page of errors instead (screenshot attached). If I know a survey's URL I can access the it from the backend there, or alternatively if the survey is active it will display a list when I click "Active Surveys". I tried updating LimeSurvey using ComfortUpdate to the latest version and that didn't work. I even manually updated it by removing the files on my ftp server and re-installing, still nothing! Does anyone have any idea where this error is coming from? I noticed most of the errors are located in the "application" and "framework" folders so I also removed those folders and re-installed, nothing is working. I spent the entire day troubleshooting and any direction you can give me would be super helpful! This started randomly this afternoon and was working fine last night. I'm the only admin and I hadn't touched it before the error started. Other users have been using it, but nothing they're able to do should have caused this...

Appreciate your help, thanks,!


Brandon Mott

could you please provide us your version/build number?

Hi Louis,

We had an older version, but I upgraded to the latest version thinking that would solve my issues. It didn't.

Version 2.58.0+170104

it seems that you have surveys without owner causing this bug.

So: I could reproduce the bug. The problem is that some surveys has a owner that no longer exist.
The fix will be in next release.

Excellent! When you said this I actually knew which survey it was because I deleted old users and tried to change owners last week (when the bug occurred). I still had the link to edit that survey in my history so I went there as I could bypass "list surveys", updated the survey information (turns out the survey name was also empty), and voila! It all works again.

Thanks so much for your help!

tank to you for reporting.

After more testing:

1. Bug appears only when debug mode is on. So normal users will not be affected.
2. When deleting a user from the admin UI, a dialog ask you to which user the owner ship of its survey should be transferred. So normal users should never have a survey with a non existent owner.

Do you know how did you manage to get survey with nonexistent owners? Did you change manually the database?

I actually think the bug was being caused by the name of the survey being non existent, and not a non existent owner. When I got back into the survey it had the admin assigned as the owner, but the survey name was blank and once i fixed that it worked again.

LouisGac wrote: ....
2. When deleting a user from the admin UI, a dialog ask you to which user the owner ship of its survey should be transferred. So normal users should never have a survey with a non existent owner.
....

Yes, sure, but i learn than , sometimes, a different version can have different behaviour (see language always set for Questions settings).
Then : we always need to test ALL combination ....