Personal links clicked automatically by third party | XM Community
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Hi,



I defined my survey to expire two weeks after respondents first click their personal links. However, in the distribution process virtually all links were "clicked" automatically at the moment of sending the emails (perhaps by bots checking that the links are safe?). Hundreds of fake responses in progress accumulated and the two-week clock started ticking for everyone.

As a temporary solution I manually deleted all responses in progress which had 0% progress, such that their expiry date will be reset when the respondent truly clicks his/her link.



1. Do you know of an easy way to prevent this automatic "clicking" on links by third party?

2. If I make my temporary solution a permanent one, is there an efficient way to delete many responses in progress at once, according to some criterion? Now I have to delete 100 at a time, and it feels that the user interface is not built for such tasks (screens updating slowly, no clear signal for what's going on after deletion).

3. Any other suggestion for solving this problem?



Thanks,

Guy
We've had this issue too. A couple of quick ways we've worked around it:

1) If it's internal users to your company, your IT team can whitelist the domain so that the links aren't crawled. In our case, it was our email system checking the links.

2) Responses with no answers should not impact your data. Note that there is one exception this and that is when there is a question in the email. So if that is the case a workaround (although not ideal) would be to remove the question from the email.

3) Change how partially completed responses are handled. - You can only delete after one week. It sounds like you would want to do sooner. I'd add this as a product idea/feature request.



Hope that helps a little!

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