Trouble Shooting Respondent Problems

This section provides some guidelines on how to deal with problems that you might encounter.

Inability to Login (No Session Available... )

This problem usually manifests itself as a message along the lines of:

LoginSubmodule: No session available for requested action: selectSurvey, queryString: module=response32&action=selectSurvey&selection=206* ...

The cause is usually that what are referred to as "session cookies" have been disabled within your browser. Survey Manager makes use of these to keep track of your progess through the survey. Some people disable cookies in their browser for privacy reasons, because they don't like the idea of websites on the Internet keeping track of the sites that they have visited, and the queries that they have made. However, please note that the session cookies that we use are discarded when the respondent logs out of the survey, or closes their browser - nothing is retained on your computer regarding the surveys that you have answered.

The mechanism for enabling session cookies varies depending on which browser, and which browser version, you are using. If using Internet Explorer version 6.0, then to enable session cookies you should open Internet Explorer (note: not Windows Explorer) and select the Tools -> Internet Options menu entry. In the resultant window, click on the Privacy tab (i.e. the "privacy" label along the top of the page). Any privacy setting except for "high" can be used. If you wish to use the “high” privacy setting, then you can press the Advanced button. On the advanced settings screen, ensure that the option "Always allow session cookies" is enabled.

If you are using the Mozilla Firefox browser, then to enable session cookies you should open the Firefox browser and select the Tools -> Options menu entry. Now click on the Privacy padlock on the left and set appropriate session settings (for example, simply check the “Allow sites to set cookies” option.

Unable to Progress Beyond First Page

The symptoms of this problem are that, after having answered the first page of the survey and pressed the Next Page button, your browser won't progress to the next page – instead it simply redisplays the first page. This is usually because some sort of caching software (e.g. a proxy server) is operating at your site to improve the efficiency of your accesses to the Internet. However, in this case it is intercepting your requests and incorrectly responding to them itself (by regurgitating pages that have passed by it previously), rather than by passing the requests on to our server. Our software does everything imaginable to tell such cache software to never save Survey Manager pages (which are dynamic - hence always need to be referred back to our server) in its cache memory. However, some software simply doesn't listen! This problem needs to be referred to your I.T. department (or to us, so that we can contact your I.T. Department).

Work-around:

If you are experiencing a problem with your browser or Internet connection, but you know someone else who has been able to successfully answer the survey, then you can use that person's PC. Alternatively, you might be able to answer the survey from home. Don't forget to take your login details with you though!