Global settings

General description

If you click on the Configuration button from the main toolbar and then on Global settings, located under the Settings tab, you will get to the Global settings of your LimeSurvey installation.

The Global settings dialog is only available to administration users with the Settings & Plugins right. It can be used to adjust certain settings of LimeSurvey in a global context. Once you enter the Global settings dialog and save your desired configuration, the previous LimeSurvey values will be overruled.

Settings and their explanation

Overview

• Overview - it provides the following general information about your LimeSurvey installation:
  • Users;
  • Surveys;
  • Active surveys;
  • Deactivated result tables;
  • Active token tables;
  • Deactivated token tables;
• Updates ^{(Obsolete since 2.06)}: For automatic updates, please use the ComfortUpdate feature. In the later versions, it can be found under the Advanced tab, located in the Configuration dialog from the main Limesurvey toolbar.

For debug purposes, you can also find a button to show your PHP Info.

General

• Site name: Give your survey site a name. This name will appear in the survey list overview and in the administration header.
• Default template: This setting specifies the default design template used for the 'public list' of surveys and for new surveys or surveys using a non-existing template. If you would like to use a personalized template, read about how you can use the LimeSurvey's template editor.

The templates are stored in /limesurvey/templates/.

• Administration template: This setting specifies the default design template used for the LimeSurvey administration. To use a costumized template, add it in /limesurvey/upload/admintheme/.
• Default HTML editor mode: Sets the default mode for integrated HTML editor. Valid settings are: inline (default), popup and none:
  • inline: Inline replacement of fields by an HTML editor. Slow but convenient and user-friendly;
  • popup: Adds an icon that opens a popup window with the HTML editor. Faster, but the HTML code is displayed on the form;
  • HTML source: No HTML editor used, just the plain html source.
• Question type selector: Choose 'Full selector' to get a question type selector with preview and 'Simple' to get a plain select box.
• Template editor:: Choose 'Full template editor' to get an enhanced editor (with syntax-highlighting) when editing survey templates and 'Simple template editor' to get a plain editor field
• Time difference (in hours): If your web server is in a different time zone to the location where your surveys will be based, put the difference between your server and your home time zone here. For example, I live in Australia, but I got a US web server. The web server is 14 hours behind my local time zone. So my setting here is "+14". In other words, it adds 14 hours to the web servers time. This setting is particularly important when surveys timestamp the responses.
• Session lifetime: [only available with database sessions] Defines the time in seconds after which a survey session expires (provided there is no action from the participant). When using regular, file-based sessions, it is up to the system administrator to define the right values for "session.gc_maxlifetime", "session.save_path", etc. in the PHP configuration. Not only the webserver settings but also similar settings by other applications may overwrite the setting for file-based sessions when setting this locally via the application. The maximum value on this is 65000 (seconds). Please use a reasonable value. When using database sessions, check whether the MySQL setting called max_allowed_packet is set to a large value because some surveys generate over 2 MB of session data.
• IP Info DB API Key: Allows integration with the IP-Info-DB service that let's you determine the geographic location of survey takers based on their IP. To have a key, you need to register for the API.
• Google Maps API Key: Allows for integration with Google Maps.
• Google Analytics Tracking ID: Allows for integration with Google Analytics. Surveys can override this site-level value. The tracking ID can be inserted into templates using {GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_API_KEY}. The full JavaScript that Google Analytics expects (including the key) can be included in templates via {GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_JAVASCRIPT}.

{{Note|For further details on how to use Google's API with LimeSurvey, check our Google API howto page.

• Google Translate API Key:  The Auto Translate feature uses version 2 of Google Translate's API. Google charges for this service. In order for the Auto Translate feature to work, get an API key from this site, and then enter the key in this field.
• Character set for file import/export: You can specify the character set most suiting you and your system, if you experience problems with exporting/importing.
• Side-menu behavior: How the side-menu should behave while editing surveys. Three options are presented:
  • Adaptive;
  • Always open;
  • Always closed.

Email settings

• Default site admin email: This is the default email address of the site administrator and it is used for system messages and contact options.
• Administrator name: The real name of the site administrator.
• Email method:  This determines how emails are being sent. The following options are available:
  • PHP: it uses internal PHP mail function;
  • Sendmail: it uses sendmail mailer;
  • SMTP: it is based on SMTP relaying. Use this setting when you are running LimeSurvey on a host that is not your mail server;
    • Make sure that you are using your SMTP configured e-mail (Global settings -> E-mail settings) at the survey settings (At the moment you create a survey or after you create it Edit Survey Settings -> General)  if you use SMTP, otherwise there might be a chance that the following error is displayed: SMTP -> ERROR: RCPT not accepted from server: 553 5.7.1 : Sender address rejected: not owned by user.
  • Qmail: Set this if you are running the Qmail mailer.
• SMTP host: If you use 'SMTP ' as email method, then you have to put your SMTP server here. If you are using a different port than port 25 (standard for SMTP), then you have to add the port number separated be a colon (example: 'smtp.gmail.com:465')
• SMTP username: If your SMTP-server needs authentication then set this to your user name, otherwise it must be blank.
• SMTP password: If your SMTP-server needs authentication then set this to your password, otherwise it must be blank.
• SMTP encryption: Three options are availalbe:
  • Off (default value);
  • SSL;
  • TLS.

{{Note|Check the following link for further details about SSL/TLS.

• SMTP debug mode: It comes with three options:
  • Off (default value): The user wants this activated only in the case in which the SMTP relay does not work and further details are needed in order remedy the technical problem;
  • On errors: A detailed connection log and error message will be given if an error occurs;
  • Always: It gives valuabe information on how a SMTP relay works. If an error occurs, further details are provided.
• Email batch size: When sending invitations or reminders to survey participants, this setting is used to determine how many emails can be sent in one bunch. Different web servers have different email capacities, and if your script takes too long to send a bunch of emails, the script could time out and cause errors. Most web servers can send 100 emails at a time within the default 30 second time limit for a PHP script. If you get script timeout errors when sending large numbers of emails, reduce the number in this setting.  Clicking the 'send email invitation' button on the token control toolbar, (not the button on the right of each token), sends the maxemails number of invitations, then displays a list of the addresses sent to and a warning that "There are more emails pending than could be sent in one batch. Continue sending emails by clicking below. There are ### emails still to be sent." and provides a "continue button" to proceed with the next batch. I.e., the user determines when to send the next batch after each batch gets emailed.  It is not necessary to wait with this screen active.  The admin could log off and come back at a later time to send the next batch of invites.

Bounce settings

• Default site bounce email: This is the email address where bounced emails will be sent to.
• Server type: If set to 'Off' no bounce processing functions will be available. Set this to POP or IMAP to check a related account for bounces.
• Server name & port: Name of the server and (if needed) the port separated by a colon.
• User name: The user name for the POP/IMAP account
• Password: The password for the POP/IMAP account
• Encryption type: If encrpytion is used please set the right one here (SSL or TLS)

Security

• Survey preview only for administration users: By default, preview of inactive survey is restricted to authenticated users only. If you set this to 'No' any person can test your survey using the survey URL - without logging in to the administration and without having to activate the survey first.
• Filter HTML for XSS: By default your survey manager will not be authorized to use dangerous HTML tags in their survey/group/question/labels texts (for instance JavaScript code). This is intended to prevent a survey operator to add malicious script in order to have a true admin raise his permissions on the system. If you want to use any script objects like Javascript scripts of Flash applets in your surveys you will need to switch this off (Specific script for video hoster can be used). The XSS filtering is always disabled for the superadministrator. In order to see the effects of XSS filtering, it is advised to use a regular user account.
    With XSS enable, some expression manager system can not be used : see XSS and Expression Manager

• Group member can only see own group: By default non-admin users defined in the LimeSurvey management interface will only be able to see other users if they belong to at least one group this user belongs to. If you set this to 'No' they can see all users (for example in Survey security settings )
• Frame embedding allowed: This option can be used to indicate whether or not a browser should be allowed to render the survey page in a <frame>, <iframe> or <object> . You can use this to avoid clickjacking attacks, by ensuring that your survey is not embedded into other sites.

If you set it to 'Allow' there is no restriction. Setting this to 'Same origin' then the content is only loaded if the survey runs on the same domain and port as the including <frame>, <iframe> or <object>.

• Force HTTPS: By default this is set to "Don't force on or off". Switch the setting to "on" to force the connection to use HTTPS.
    If your server doesn't support HTTPS properly, you can lock yourself from the system! Therefore test the "check if this link works" link first.If the link does not work and you turn on HTTPS, LimeSurvey will break and you won't be able to access it.

 Hint: If you activate https by error, you can deactivate it in application/config/config.php file using ssl_emergency_override to 1.

Presentation

• Show 'no answer' option for non-mandatory questions: When a question of a radio button/select type that contains editable answers (i.e.: List & array questions) is not mandatory and this is set to 'Yes' (default), an additional entry 'No answer' is shown for each subquestion - so that participants may choose to not answer the question. Some people prefer this not to be available. Set this to 'No' to turn this off.
• Repeating headings in array questions every X subquestions: With array type question, often you'll have a lot of subquestions, which - when displayed on screen - take up more than one page. The repeat-headers setting lets you decide how many answers should be displayed before repeating the header information for the question. A good setting for this is around 25. If you don't want the headings to repeat at all, set this to 0.
• Show "There are X questions in this survey":
• Show question group name and/or description:
• Show question number and/or question code:

Language

• Default site language: This is the default language to be used in your administration , and also the default language for the public survey list if none is given.
• Available languages: If you don't want all languages to be available in the administration language select boxes you can here define the language that should be available only.

Interfaces

• RPC interface enabled: Using this feature you can activate/deactivate the LimeSurvey RemoteControl2 interface API, either using JSON-RPC (recommended) or XML-RPC.

• Publish API on /admin/remotecontrol: If you activate this option then under the specified URL a short description of the API functions will be available. Usually you should not need to activate it and should only be activated for debug purposes in general.