Activating a survey

Once you are happy with the structure of your survey, you can activate it by clicking on the Activate this survey button:

Before activation, a window will be displayed, asking you about some general survey settings:

  If you decide to activate a survey, no edits can be done to the groups, questions, subquestions, and their corresponding codes.

• Anonymyzed responses: This option allows you to determine whether responses to your survey are matched up with information from your survey's token table, or kept "anonymous". If you decide to enable it, your survey is set to anonymize responses - there will be no way to connect answers and participants;
• Save IP address: If enabled, the IP address of the survey respondent will be stored together with his/her answers;
• Save timings: If enabled, the time spent on each page of the survey by each survey participant is recorded;
• Date stamp: Turn it on if you would like to see the date the answers were submitted;
• Save referrer URL: If enabled, the referrer URL will be stored together with the answers.

Once you are done enabling the desired functionalities, click on the Save & activate survey button. The following message should be displayed:

Select the option No, thanks to disable the closed-access mode! In this way, everyone will have access to your survey.

Congratulations! You have activated your first survey! If you want to start sharing the survey URL, go to the home page of your survey, and look for the survey URL in the Survey summary:

Copy the link and start sharing it.

By activating a survey, LimeSurvey:

• creates a separate database table where all survey responses are stored, a new entry being added for each new collected survey response
• allows survey administrators to manually enter data into that response table or edit the existent data

Before you activate a survey, note that:

• when the survey is initialized, you can change the text for questions, answers, the survey etc, but not the type of question or the type of answer.
• you cannot add new questions or delete questions. Nor can you add answers to any of the array or multiple choice questions - however you can add answers to the basic list type questions.
• if you deactivate (not expire) the survey, it will move the responses to a backup table and lose participation information but you will again be able to add new questions and groups and to modify parameters.

If the Activate this survey button is disabled, then your survey is not yet capable of being activated (for example if you have no questions created yet). Once clicking on this icon, LimeSurvey will run a quick consistency check to make sure that your survey will work properly.