Closing a survey

=General=

To stop a survey, you can either "expire" or "deactivate" it.

=Expiry=

You can manually expire the survey if you edit the survey details and set an "Expiry date/time":



Alternatively, when trying to deactivate the survey (by clicking on the "stop this survey" button), an option to expire the survey is provided, which performs the same function:



If you decide to expiry your survey:
 * No results are lost
 * No respondent information is lost
 * Change of questions, groups, and parameters is limited
 * An expired survey is not accessible to participant (they only see a message that the survey has expired)
 * It's possible to perform statistics on responses inside LimeSurvey

To make the survey available to your participants again, change or remove the expiration date from the publication & access panel.

=Deactivation=

Click on "Stop this survey" button located on the top toolbar:



Once loaded, click on the Deactivate survey button:




 * All results are lost (you cannot access them via the LimeSurvey user interface)
 * All respondent information is lost
 * The deactivated survey is not accessible to the respondent (a message will be displayed stating that you are not permitted to see this survey)
 * All questions, groups, and parameters are editable again
 * It is recommended to export your responses before using this option

Help! I accidentally deactivated my survey - what now?
If you closed your survey accidentally, it is important that you don't change anything in your survey. To recover your data:


 * 1) Activate your survey again
 * 2) Select Responses from the survey toolbar.
 * 3) Click on Import and select the "Import answers from a deactivated survey table" menu entry.
 * 4) Choose your source table.
 * 5) Click on the "Import" button located on the upper-right part of the screen.



Currently, LimeSurvey detects and handles the following changes:
 * Question is moved to another group (result is imported correctly).
 * Question is removed from target (result is ignored).
 * Question is added to target (result is set to database default value).