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Thursday, 23 August 2012

Some problems I am having with Survey Monkey in which deleting cookies doesn't seem to help

Edit: a few minutes later ;)
A cleverer colleague pointed out that the problem could be stemmed at source by adding an exception block for all cookies from SurveyMonkey. This works beautifully.

To do this in Firefox go to Tools » Options and click on the Privacy tab. Where it asks if you want Firefox to remember your history choose 'use custom settings for history' then make sure the 'accept cookies' bit is ticked (if you want to accept cookies from other sites) but click on 'Exceptions' and add in the root web address of the one(s) you want to block, in my case http://www.surveymonkey.com, then click the Block button and OK your way out of the menu and you're done.




I am transcribing hundreds of paper surveys into a SurveyMonkey survey. Once the survey is finished the system assumes you're done and doesn't let you refresh the survey to add in the details of another sheet. The way around this is to delete cookies then refresh and this resets things nicely.

However it isn't doing so today and no amount of cookie deletion, entire history deletion, private browsing, or refreshing the page with F5 will help. That's with Firefox.

I've tried creating a SurveyMonkey account and logging in and that doesn't work either.

I'm now on to MSIE (internet explorer) which involves a longer process to delete cookies, but it is currently working and I'm able to add in each new survey. I don't know if that will suddenly start working but I've also got Chrome and Safari on my desktop and I don't mind downloading more browsers, although there comes a point when it does all get rather silly.

Surely I can't be the only person who needs to transcribe paper surveys and has come up against this problem? While I might wish the surveyees had been given the link to fill in the survey themselves there are good practical reasons why paper should be used and so that's not going to change.

Is there a setting I can switch on that lets me solve this without having to go under the bonnet after adding in each new survey?

Ta!

2 comments:

  1. Under your collector settings, can you set multiple responses per computer? In addition to this, if you have a gold or platinum plan, you can set the survey to loop back to the beginning once the survey is completed. Last time I had a question about SurveyMonkey I contacted their support and they answered me thunder fast :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cheers Anonymous :) Problem was solved by setting a specific exception in cookies so that my browser never accepts them from SurveyMonkey - once I'd done that it worked perfectly and I could refresh the page and fill in all 313 scripts, phew!

    SurveyMonkey's amazing - I'm just the data entry person so don't normally have access to the analysis (I didn't have the login) but once I entered all the transcripts my colleague let me log in and see the end results. Fascinating stuff and I'm now doing some preliminary analysis on it, but I'm not a professional evaluator so the data will get handed to someone a bit more competent!

    Thanks,
    Jo

    ReplyDelete

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