Publish Your Survey

Publishing a survey creates a publication, which is a snapshot of the survey at a specific point in time. Participants interact with the publication, not the live survey editor. This means you can continue editing the survey without affecting responses already being collected. If the survey content has not changed since the last snapshot, publishing reuses that snapshot rather than creating a new one, so a single snapshot can back more than one publication.

Before publishing

Confirm the survey content has been reviewed in the Preview tab, and that any settings such as language, access rules, or presentation options have been configured. See Settings.

Invalid conditions block publishing

Publishing checks the survey for invalid conditions. See Conditional Questions for what makes a condition invalid and how to fix one. If any invalid conditions remain, publishing is blocked and the errors are shown, so they can be corrected before trying again.

Step 1: Open the publish modal

Open your survey and go to the Edit tab. Click the Publish button in the top-right of the editor. If the survey has been published before, the button shows as Published - click it to open the same modal.

Step 2: Create a publication

The publish modal has two optional fields. Label is a short name to identify this publication, for example “Initial publication” or “Wave 2”, useful when creating multiple publications over time. Notes is for free-text notes such as the reason for this publication or what changed since the last one.

Click Publish to confirm. The publication is created with a status of Published and the current timestamp is recorded as the Published date.

Step 3: Set a publication window (optional)

If you want the survey to stop accepting responses after a certain date, you can set a start or end date in the publish modal. Alternatively, go to Settings and open the Schedule section to set these dates before publishing. Responses submitted outside the window are not accepted.

If no dates are set, the publication remains active until you stop it manually.

Step 4: Share with participants

Go to the Participants tab to add participants and send invitation emails. See Invite Participants for full instructions.

Stopping a publication

When you no longer want to collect responses, go to the Edit tab and click the Published button in the top-right. A modal opens showing the current publish status. Click Unpublish to stop the publication. The status changes to Stopped and the Stopped date is recorded. Existing responses are not affected.

A stopped publication cannot be restarted. If you need to collect more responses, create a new publication. See Merge Publication Responses if you want to consolidate responses from multiple publications.

Publishing after making changes to a survey

If you update the survey after it has been published, the existing publication continues to use the original snapshot. To collect responses against the updated version, create a new publication. The new publication captures the current state of the survey.

Language content in snapshots

When a publication is created, the translated text for every configured language is frozen into the snapshot separately from the survey structure. Participants receive the text for their assigned language (plus the default language as a fallback) from these frozen records. Changes to language content after publishing do not affect existing publications.