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Auto-Detect Issues

The Auto-Detect Issues feature helps you proactively identify and resolve common survey problems that may negatively impact respondent experience and data quality. When enabled, SurveyTester automatically scans your survey for structural, formatting, and content-related issues.

Using this feature during testing allows you to detect and fix problems early, ensuring a smoother survey experience and more reliable data collection.

Configuration Auto-Detect Issues can be:

  • Enabled or disabled at the Company level (default setting), or
  • Configured individually at the Role level, or
  • Configured individually at the Project level
Available Checks

1. Detect Survey Errors on Page: Scans the rendered survey page for error messages generated by the survey engine, such as:

  • Script errors
  • Missing variables
  • Routing failures
  • Runtime warnings

Any issues visible to respondents or testers are reported.

2. Detect Grid Questions Without Attributes

Identifies grid (matrix) questions that do not contain any rows (attributes).
Such questions are considered incomplete and cannot function correctly.

3. Detect Single Response Questions With Only One Category

Flags single-select questions that provide only one answer option.
These questions cannot capture meaningful input and typically indicate a configuration error.

4. Detect Categorical Questions Without Categories

Detects categorical questions (single-select or multi-select) that do not have any answer options defined.

5. Check Category Taxonomy

Ensures consistency across answer category labels by verifying:

  • Capitalization style
  • Punctuation
  • Sentence structure
  • Prefixes and suffixes

Any inconsistencies (e.g., mismatched casing or punctuation) are highlighted.

6. Check Attribute Taxonomy

Applies the same consistency checks as Category Taxonomy, but to grid attributes (rows).

7. Detect Duplicate Categories

Identifies duplicate answer options within the same question based on identical labels.

8. Detect Duplicate Attributes

Identifies duplicate rows (attributes) within the same grid question.

9. Detect Errors in Numeric Category Ranges

Validates numeric ranges in answer categories and reports:

  • Overlaps (including shared boundaries, e.g., 10–20 and 20–30)
  • Gaps (e.g., missing ranges such as 21–30 between 10–20 and 31–40)

This helps ensure proper grouping for responses like age, income, or usage ranges.

10. Detect Errors in Numeric Attribute Ranges

Performs the same numeric validation as above but applies it to grid attributes.

11. Detect Empty Categories

Flags answer options that:

  • Contain no text
  • Include only whitespace
  • Contain formatting without visible content

12. Detect Empty Attributes

Flags grid rows that do not contain any visible label.

13. Detect Categories with Underscore in Visible Label

Identifies answer options containing underscores (e.g., age_group) in visible text.
This often indicates unresolved variables or placeholders.

14. Detect Attributes with Underscore in Visible Label

Applies the same underscore detection to grid attribute labels.

15. Detect Missing Images

Checks for image elements that fail to load due to:

  • Broken URLs
  • Missing files
  • Incorrect paths
  • Server errors

16. Detect Visible HTML on the Page

Detects raw HTML tags (e.g., <br>, &nbsp;) that appear as visible text instead of rendering properly, indicating formatting or encoding issues.

Company Level Setting:

By default, Auto-Detect Issues is enables at company level.

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Role Level Setting:

Auto-Detect Issues at role level, is used to Show (Enable)  or Hide (Disable) the issues detected in the Issues list.

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As you notice the feature is turned off (above image), hence you see there are issues detected 56 but the Issues list is blank (below image).

Please note: Admin roles will always see Auto-Detected Issues by default.

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However, the user has the flexibility to use Filter option to create a filter to show the Auto Detected issues. 

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These issues can be identified by fields - Created by and Auto-detected.

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Project Level Setting:

User can select the needed detection features from the Project Details tab.

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If a large number of issues have already been generated, you can quickly clean them up using bulk actions:

Bulk Deleting Issues

  1. Navigate to the Issues section.
  2. Sort the list Created by 'Survey Tester' to group similar issues together.
  3. Select the first issue in the list by checking its checkbox.
  4. Hold the Shift key and click the checkbox of the last issue you want to select. This will select all issues in between.
  5. Click Bulk Delete to remove the selected issues in one action.

This method allows you to efficiently manage and clean up multiple issues at once.

Summary

Enabling Auto-Detect Issues helps ensure that:

  • Surveys are structurally complete
  • Content is consistent and user-friendly
  • Technical errors are identified early

This results in a higher-quality survey experience and more accurate data collection.

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