What is the cause for the "Your session was outdated" information message?

I have just had a customer experience this same issue. Each time they try to submit the survey, the message shows up again. Test email/surveys sent to our team don't show the message, so we had no way of anticipating it. The customer even tried submitting the survey using a few different browsers. I really need to make sure this doesn't happen again. It's lucky that we've just submitted this survey to a small group of people that already like us. P.S. I've already reached out to Support. Also, I don't think the above post should be labeled as "Accepted Answer". If this type of error happens, there should be an explanation documented here instead of just "contact support."

I had a customer experience the same thing and Qualtrics support said it was because they were using Outlook and had the security settings on Safelink. Don't know what that is but it can't be very popular a I run thousands of business surveys every year and have never seen this problem before!

Hi all, Did Qualtrics ever share what is causing this problem? Many of our users are experiencing this too. (We likewise use Safelinks in Outlook, if useful to know.)

> @samhoward1 said: > Also, I don't think the above post should be labeled as "Accepted Answer". If this type of error happens, there should be an explanation documented here instead of just "contact support." This community is made up of users who offer advice and help. If the system isn't functioning as intended, the best way to get it documented and to get help is through Support. As far as I know, Support doesn't read these boards and definitely doesn't respond here. Community is great for sharing ideas and "How do I..." kind of things but if something is broken, Support is your best bet. Hope your issue gets resolved soon! 😀

I'll add some clarification on this issue that Support provided to me below, along with their limited avoidance strategies. The short answer is that this problem is currently unavoidable for use cases where we're distributing individual links via email and want to track who took the survey. Q-Support: "...To provide a bit more detail, this issue can also occur when there are multiple active survey sessions being recorded for a particular respondent. This issue can occur for example if a user forwards their individual link to be taken by colleagues, creating contradictory responses and invalidating the data. But, this issue can also occur due to the security settings of certain email applications (typically Microsoft Outlook). As a security setting, Outlook will often attempt to open a link in an email to verify that it is safe and not spam or malware. This can create an active survey session which can cause this error message." Me: "So it sounds like these are essentially conditions outside of our control to avoid, but it also sounds like cases such as this are rare, correct? My main concerns is that if this is happening to a number of respondents, they might not reach out to tell me, and a we might be losing valuable data as a result. Is there a report that Qualtrics produces to let us know if this has occurred for a user? Also, what is the appropriate response if this does happen? Is it a matter of simply resending the survey to the recipient who experienced and then hope it doesn’t happen again? Does the user have to change settings on their end? Just trying to nail down a response or, if possible, avoidance strategy." Q-Support: "Yes, these issues are pretty rare, and since they occur due to external software, there is not a report which we could retrieve that would indicate this has occurred. Something to note is that this error will only occur with individual links, as they will restrict a survey from being taken twice from a particular link. Using multiple complete links instead of an individual link would prevent this error from occurring, but would allow your users to take surveys more than once. Anonymous links would also prevent the error, but you would lose the ability to connect responses to contact list entries."

> @samhoward1 said: > I'll add some clarification on this issue that Support provided to me below, along with their limited avoidance strategies. The short answer is that this problem is currently unavoidable for use cases where we're distributing individual links via email and want to track who took the survey. Great info! One way you could potentially get around this is by using an anonymous link with an authenticator. It's a bigger ask for your respondents but if you're more concerned with losing data than you are with response rates, it's an option to consider.

We've had this reported to us as a side effect of using link testing functionality. There are quite a few articles about this screwing up links for marketing as link inspection tests the link for Malware. The Qualtrics answer seems to be "just whitelist" but as anyone (including phishers) can register fro a Qualtics account we reserve the right to inspect and block traffic to our University. That's a new technology being used in many businesses and HE's now, and the developers will need to find a better fix or we'll need to use alternate survey tools.

Happening more an more with our customers particularly with government and education clients. Quarterly survey went out and many many complaints. Have not found a work around, yet.

We are also beginning to experience this issue across our institution. We use Outlook with Safelink. We will need to communicate with our end users to show them how to use Qualtrics Distributions with alternate features (Anonymous Link, Authenticator, etc).

This is happening all of the time now. Do we know why it affects some users but not others at the same organization? Typically they would all have the same outlook settings.

This is now happening with us, seems since late last year...but only hearing about it from our end user this week.

We are also getting reports of users having this issue. Seems more wide-spread than initially thought...