Validated responses

The address a survey posts its answers to is public, because it has to be: it is called from visitors’ browsers. So every response is checked against the survey it names before anything is stored. The survey must belong to that website, every answer must be to one of its own questions, once, choices must be among its options and scores must be on its scale.

Every required question must be answered too. A response that skips one, answers a question the survey does not have, or puts a nine on a five point scale is refused whole rather than stored in part, so the numbers on the results screen are built only from answers the survey could actually have produced.

Responses are timestamped by our server, not by the visitor’s clock. A device with the wrong date, or a request with a forged one, cannot push an answer into last year or next month and skew the timeline.

Ending a survey does not throw answers away. It keeps showing until the website’s next publish, and answers given in that window are still saved, because they are real answers from real visitors and refusing them would also mean asking those people again later.