Hi all,

as in subject, I'd like to pre-fill some answers in my survey, but it has to be anonymous. Is it possible?

I'm able to associate ATTRIBUTE_N to an user and use it to prefill answers but this seems not possible in anonymous surveys, and I can build an HTML link to my survey that fills my needed fields, but this solution is prone to url forging. Is there an other way to accomplish my goal?

Maybe I use the wrong tool: I need my students to evaluate courses and teachers anonymously, so my idea is to build a survey (it will be used for every courses and every year and will be used in statistics), inviting students to evaluate their courses in every aspects. Course name and teacher name are pre-filled and hidden answers. Am I doing it right or there is another, more linear way to accomplish this?


Thanks in advance

You can not use Token Attributes to fill anonymous surveys. So you will have to look into other options.

Here a few options that I currently see:

Maybe you can also anonymize "course name" and "teacher name" by giving them codes and transmit this via the survey link. Yes, students can change this if they want to, but I don't see much you can do here.

Or you could create tokens for each course name / teacher name combination and send it to the respective students. Just increase the number of uses left. However, this means that some students could fill in the survey twice and others will not be able to respond at all.

How do you distribute the survey link? I assume via email?

I think there is no perfect solution if you need to make the survey anonymous on technical basis.

You could also ask the student about the course name and teacher name they would evaluate. But I guess this is something you want to avoid.

Maybe someone else comes up with a clever idea.

First of all thanks for your quick reply!

holch wrote: You can not use Token Attributes to fill anonymous surveys. So you will have to look into other options.

Here a few options that I currently see:

Maybe you can also anonymize "course name" and "teacher name" by giving them codes and transmit this via the survey link. Yes, students can change this if they want to, but I don't see much you can do here.

Or you could create tokens for each course name / teacher name combination and send it to the respective students. Just increase the number of uses left. However, this means that some students could fill in the survey twice and others will not be able to respond at all.

I too thought about the first suggestion, even by encrypting answers with a control code (eg: John_Smith__Course_A__CHECKME): decrypting it should gives me the assurance that the answer received is valid. But it has the drawback of off-platform processing to use answers by humans, that I'd like to avoid if possible.

The second suggestion may be a viable option, I have to think about it.

holch wrote: How do you distribute the survey link? I assume via email?

I think there is no perfect solution if you need to make the survey anonymous on technical basis.

You could also ask the student about the course name and teacher name they would evaluate. But I guess this is something you want to avoid.

Maybe someone else comes up with a clever idea.

Yes, I will distribute the survey by email, via Limesurvey or external script, and yes, I prefer to pre-fill answers to aggregate surveys without problems. Let the students type names is too prone to typing/memory error: I'm happy enough avoiding mistakes even if I can't exclude malicious error.

Thanks again