I am seeing a relatively low response rate on some of my surveys. Today, I had a recipient call to say they could not get my survey to load. Upon checking her email, I see that the original invitation contained the survey URL split between two lines, and of course, the mail program's parser didn't realize that it needed to join the URL pieces back together.

This resulted in the user clicking a PARTIAL survey URL, and this failed.

I am proposing that LimeSurvey create an interface to an existing URL shortening service, so that a shorter URL can be generated. This may not solve all problems (depending on how close to the end of a line the URL appears within the email message), but it would certainly help a bit.

HI Je

I did this manually with an open survey and got classified a spamer , so beware.

You may provide a shortened URL and the token (using the {TOKEN} placeholder) as a fallback solution. But i strongly recommend that tou only keep your link visible in order to play nice with the spam detection engines.

This is not to discourage you to push this feature, but just to suggest you should not rely exclusively on a shortened URL.

You're right, Atiut,

My application for Lime Survey is a customer satisfaction survey, so it is only sent to clients, and only after some service has been provided.

I hadn't even thought of the possibility of being classified a spammer. I was strictly looking for a way to shorten the {SURVEYURL} so it wouldn't get split up and fail to work.

Thanks both for your feedback.

Using short URLs sounds like a nice feature but I guess it's no bifg deal to set them up yourself and edit the email templates.

If you're planning to shorten the URL by introducing a "front end" script (like I did), then it's no big deal provided the user has the skills to do this.

However, setting up an automated process to create shortened URLs through LimeSurvey directly IS a big deal. I don't want to have to take each normally generated invitation URL, feed it through "tinyurl" or another similar product, then manually insert the shortened URL into each invitation.

That's why I wanted to know if LimeSurvey had the ability to interface with such a service and create a token like {SHORTSURVEYURL} that would automatically generate a more compact link.

JEfromCanada wrote: Sounds like a nice idea: You can add this as a feature request at our feature tracker . Please describe your idea as detailed as possible and try to outline a suitable solution/implementation as well.

I have submitted the request. Thanks for the suggestion.

Please post the link here so that other users can follow it and vote for the solution.

I agree, short urls can make things easy but some people don't really like them.

As alternative solution for shortening urls there's a workaround mentioned at docs.limesurvey.org/Optional+settings&highlight=mod_rewrite, i.e. activating the mod_rewrite and using this way to shorten the url. Another possible way is to created a redirect page that redirects to the survey. For example
http://localhost/resolve.php?sid=123456&lang=de&token=78910
that redirects to
http://localhost/limesurvey/index.php?sid=123456&lang=de&token=78910

But I like the idea and will vote for it.

vierundzwanzig wrote:
My short term solution, as I alluded to above and discussed at length in another thread, was exactly that - I created a redirect page. But, to ensure the link was short, I used the strategy:

http://localhost/resolve.php?token=78910

As far as a reluctance for people to click on short links, I will need to verify that this would work, but if implemented properly, the url could be short, while keeping the description of the target link exactly as it is now.

For example [a href="shorturl"]original long url description[/a]

May result in a URL that, even if the original logn url description gets split into two lines, the shorturl should be located, in its entirety, on the first line, and therefore, should function normally.

In response to a request from Mazi, here is the link to my idea.

ideas.limesurvey.org/ideatorrent/idea/353/