Testing an activity before it goes live

As well as testing their activities in Citizen Space's preview mode, some people like to run a test phase or pilot phase and receive actual test responses.

You can do this by publishing privately, sharing the URL with a select few test subjects to submit responses, and then retracting the activity. Once you've checked that you're happy everything's working as you expected, you can remove the test responses from your dashboard and change the activity back to the public setting ready for the launch.

Here are some step-by-step instructions explaining exactly how to do this.

1. From the dashboard, go into 'Edit activity details' and select the check-box to make the activity 'private'. (This is only temporary for the test phase and we'll be changing it back to public before it goes live.) Remember to scroll down and save this change using the button at the bottom of the page.

   Changing the activity to private will change the ending of the URL to what we call an obfuscated URL - the ending will be a mix of letters and numbers which no one could possibly guess. This means that only someone you've shared the private URL with (our test subjects) will be able to access the activity while it's set as private.

2. Publish the activity via the green button on the dashboard and copy the private URL to share with your testers and ask them to submit responses. When everyone is finished submitting you can retract the activity via the red button on the dashboard.
3. Once you've conducted your research, tested the tools that you need to and/or received feedback from your testers, you may wish to clear out the test responses from your dashboard. This article explains how you can remove responses from your dashboard.
4. Lastly, change the activity back to 'public' by returning to 'Edit activity details' and un-selecting the private check-box. Don't forget to scroll down and save this change using the button at the bottom of the page. When you scroll back up you'll see that the URL will have changed back to what it was originally - this public URL is the one that you need to promote when you launch the activity for real. 

Now you're ready to publish your activity via the 'Publish' button on the dashboard when it's time to go live.