Warnings around editing a published activity

There are some bits of information in Citizen Space where you will see a warning advising you not to edit those bits if your activity is published. These are:

We'll be discussing the following topics in this article:

Why should these not be edited?

Making a change to any of these fields can result in the survey's URL changing.  If the URL changes, there are implications for any respondents who are viewing or responding to it:

  • If a survey becomes private, anyone who tries to access it on its old public URL (eg from a bookmark, a link in an email, or because they're currently looking at it when it changes) will see a 'Not Found' error message instead.
  • If a survey's URL changes for any other reason, respondents will be redirected to the new location rather than seeing a 'Not Found' error.  However, if they are in the middle of filling in an online survey, they will lose all the answers they have already filled out.  This is the main reason that URL changes need to be done with great caution. This doesn't apply to save-and-return links, which will still work and redirect to the survey's new location.

Why can't I change the owner?  What's that got to do with the URL?

If a survey is assigned to a new owner, it may also be moved into that owner's department.  Since the department name forms part of the URL, this has the same effect as changing the survey's URL directly.