Capping and screening responses
Two different needs get muddled together: capping how much data you collect, and screening out people who don’t qualify. Indacas handles them in different places.
Capping a distribution
Limits belong to a distribution, not to the survey, so different links can have different limits. When you create one you can set:
- Max responses — collection stops once that many responses come in. Leave it empty for no limit.
- Expiry date — the distribution stops accepting responses after that date. Leave it empty and it never expires.
- Require authentication — respondents must sign in before answering.
- Allow multiple — whether the same recipient can respond more than once.
Because each distribution carries its own cap, running two links with separate limits is how you split collection between groups. See Distributing your survey.
Screening people out
Screening is logic. On the question that decides eligibility, add a branch rule whose action is screen out: anyone whose answer matches is taken out of the survey at that point rather than working through questions that don’t apply to them.
The other branch targets are useful nearby — end the survey for people who are legitimately finished early, and open a URL to hand someone off somewhere else. See Logic rules.
Put screeners as early as you can. A respondent screened out on page one costs them ten seconds; one screened out on page six has given you five pages of data you can’t use and had their time wasted.
Closing collection by hand
You don’t have to wait for a cap. Expiring a distribution stops it accepting responses immediately, and the ones already collected are unaffected. Creating a fresh distribution is how you reopen — a new link, pinned to the survey as it stands now.
Stopping at a target per group
Capping a total is built in; capping per segment — “50 responses from each age band, then stop taking that band” — isn’t available as a rule yet. Until it is, the workable approach is a separate distribution per group with its own max responses, each sent to that group.