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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T01:12:00+00:00

FURTHER EDIT: Given that individuals can only access the questionnaire from a seperate website,

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FURTHER EDIT: Given that individuals can only access the questionnaire from a seperate website, not internal on their LAN/ WAN – I’m thinking all I can do is have a link for each group of people and simply limit that to the number in the group, not control the issue of 10 individual responses or 1 person doing it 10 times…

EDIT: Imagine a scenario where there is 1 pc – 10 people need to complete the questionnaire, all from the same PC. We cannot contact the 10 people, we have no means of doing so. We need to ensure (as much as possible) that there are only 10 responses and, ideally, they are done by the 10 individuals, not 1 person doing it 10 times!**

This is more general advice needed than a specific answer to a question – however, I’m still hopeful you guys can help.

Currently we have a short questionnaire that we need to ensure that is only completed once by each person to ensure data validity.

We cannot email each individual a unique link to the questionnaire as they do not have email addresses.

In addition, we also need to control the number of responses to the questionnaire from each group of people (for example a group of 10 cannot have 11 responses).

Does anyone have any advice on how this might be achieved without sending unique links to individuals?

Note, technology in use is MySQL, PHP, Javascript (some jQuery and a very small amount of Ajax).

Thanks in advance,

Homer.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It is virtually impossible to uniquely identify a specific user at 100% absolute certainty.

    The user can always remove cookies, change his IP address, clear cache and localStorage.

    Theoretically the user may fill in the questionnaire and format his computer, to fill it again.

    The real question here, where do you compromise? You can always set a cookie, and comparing it against his IP address in the database, does it guarantee he can’t bypass it? No, it can’t. How malicious are your users? Will they try to scam the system?

    Another possibility is require an account made for each user filling in the questionnaire, but again, nothing prevents a user from opening multiple accounts.

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