Surveys keep restarting

[beachbumboy]

FYI:
I started to get reports of people starting surveys and then half way through being thrown back to page 1, all data lost (not happy campers). Was only in surveys that take a while.

The cause ended up being that I had set some recycle worker settings in the Checkbox Application Pool. See:

Worker process recycling drops application session state (IIS 6.0)

Turned all recycling back off and it seems to be ok.

[ncushing]

Did the survey in quesion allow users to resume? If so, Checkbox (as of 4.5) should be able to handle an application pool recycling (or even a full web server reboot) as long as IIS is back up by the time they click the Back/Next button.

[beachbumboy]

Not 100% sure because it was happening to a few different surveys. Generally I tell people to avoid the resume option because we don't use respondent accounts and I don't fully trust it to always work. I mean how can it possibly work if you have 2 people on the same computer.

[ncushing]

For anonymous respondents sharing a computer, that issue is a little tricky since the resume functionality is necessarily cookie-based on that scenario. If the users access the computer using the same login credentials, then they'll share cookies, though if they each login and have their own profile they'd have their own cookie store and things should work ok. In a few cases, we have seen network setups where the proxy appeared to cache cookies, leading to all sorts of fun.

[beachbumboy]

This should be mentioned when this option is selected. I have researchers who think that because it is an option it must be 100% reliable. This is a serious probelm because if the data has ethical or privacy issues it is not just inconvenient if one person sees anothers data.