Bot using gift card link within survey | XM Community
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Hello,

I’m currently a doctorial student distributing a survey to gather information about sefl-determination in young adults with a history of foster care. As part of my project I created a questionnaire and converted into Qualtrics. To recruit participants(hard group to survey) I’ve been disbursing my survey  via links and QR codes on flyers and post approved throughout state and community care organizations working with this group and on private groups on Reddit and Facebook. The survey is set up where eligible participants can complete the survey and are redirected at the end to another anonymous link to receive their incentive (Typical protocol approved by my IRB).  I had the issue of bots getting through the survey and using the anonymous link at the end to try to get the incentive. I also realized at some point there where more gift card responses collected than surveys completed. Before publishing I had bot detection and repeated responses enabled on both and with a normal question meant to capture simple bots that respond randomly. After seeing this I now paused the survey and added in additional hidden question (hidden with the honeycomb java script) and GEOip requirement to root out more bots using the logic feature in survey flow. I’m wondering three things before a recommence data collection. 

  1. is it a way for me to remove bots who didn’t use the link from the end of the survey from the second gift card survey? 
  2. is it possible to remove the same respondents who were flagged as likely bots and completed the first survey and follow the survey to the second link?. .
  3. Require a certain percentage of the survey be complete before being able to access the link at the end?

I did also collected some metadata in the first survey and second but only see it in the first(I’m guessing because of the short length of the gift card survey) I have limited funding and time to complete my project and I want to make sure that most incentives go to the participants who are eligible and not tech savvy bots or repeaters exploiting it. 

One of the option we can use as preventive measure is use referral website check in the second anonymous survey.


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