Auto Exclude rules

Reporting > Report Helpers > Auto Exclude Rules

Auto Exclude rules are a set of survey conditions that exclude incoming surveys automatically from reporting statistics. You might do this, for example, to exclude survey results that have a high probability of coming from a cheater trying to artificially alter survey statistics. For a more robust solution to remove artificially-altered survey results, see Anti-cheating Engine.

Note: Auto Exclude rules apply to incoming surveys only. Newly-created rules have no impact on surveys already processed.
Tip: The auto exclude process occurs right after a response is received. An administrator can use a survey's response date as the survey auto exclusion date if needed for data reporting purposes.

Properties on the Auto Exclude Rules screen

Rule Name
A unique name for the rule, such as Open Proxy or Taken Too Quickly. The Auto Exclude Rules screen lists rules alphabetically.
Condition
The condition used to filter surveys, using standard condition syntax. For more information, see Conditional expressions.
Click Open Regex Editor to open a dialog that enables you to format and test regular expressions in your condition.
Active
When on, the Auto Exclude rule checks all incoming surveys for a match of the Condition. The Auto Exclude Rules screen lists all active rules above inactive rules.

Examples

The following condition exclude surveys:

  • Completed in under 60 seconds, and which are likely submitted by an automated script: a_elapsed_seconds < 60

  • Taken from an IP address that is part of an anonymizing network (such as TOR): a_is_open_proxy = 1

  • Taken from a specific IP addresses (useful when testing): a_ipaddress='139.255.52.210'

Here's a rule that excludes surveys submitted by a specific user name:

An Auto Exclude rule that filters by a specific customer name
Note: Do not develop and test Auto Exclude rules in production instances. Recall that conditions are not validated until they are actually used on new, incoming surveys. If a problem occurs when the rule is actually applied, an issue might be generated for the company, referencing a COMPANY_PUMP problem.

Always test Auto Exclude rules on a sandbox instance. For more information, see Sandboxes.

Accessing excluded surveys

To view excluded surveys in the Responses Form report, you must have the View Excluded Surveys permission. To create Auto Exclude Rules, or to exclude or include surveys manually in the Responses Form report, you must have the Exclude Surveys capability. For more information, see .

Custom reports can access excluded records using the Invitations option of the SlugDataSet.

The impact of Auto Exclude rules on survey status

If a survey matches any Auto Exclude rule, the survey is given the special status AUTO_EXCLUDED instead of the usual COMPLETED status. The AUTO_EXCLUDED state is similar to the EXCLUDED state. The key difference is that the AUTO_EXCLUDED surveys are not sent through full survey processing.

You can exclude surveys manually (or include surveys that were previously excluded) on the Responses Form report. An AUTO_EXCLUDED survey you manually include receives the EXIT_AUTO_INCLUDED status. That state is similar to the COMPLETION_PENDING status, but causes Auto Exclude rule processing to be skipped.

For more information about survey status values, see Survey status (e_status).

Note: You might need to create or modify calculated fields and reports to include Auto Exclude rule survey states. For example, if you use Auto Exclude rules and invitation management, consider adding a user-visible, calculated status field to Invitations Filter reports.