Polls & Surveys
Asking a question and getting an honest answer: anonymous or identified, who can answer, when results appear, and what can be undone.
A poll is one question. A survey can be as long as you need, spread over pages, and can branch so people only see the questions that apply to them.
Both are made the same way, from Polls & Surveys in your dashboard, and both are answered on a page that tells people what is happening to their answers before they give any.
The two decisions that shape everything
Anonymous or identified
On an anonymous survey, nothing is stored that connects a response to a person. Not the account, not the name, not the email address, not the IP address, and not the time it was answered, which is kept only as a date. You see totals and never who said what, and neither does anybody else, including Ardent.
On an identified survey, each response is recorded against the person who gave it, and you can see and follow up on individual answers.
This cannot be changed once anybody has answered. A survey advertised as anonymous on Monday must not be collecting names on Tuesday under the same link, so changing your mind means making a new survey.
Choose anonymous when honesty matters more than follow-up: staff feedback, a sensitive community question, anything where people will soften what they say if their name is attached. Choose identified when you need to reply to individuals, or when the answers are part of a process such as an application.
When results appear
Four choices, and it is stated to respondents before they answer:
| Setting | Results are visible |
|---|---|
| Public | Straight away, to anybody |
| After answering | Once that person has answered |
| After closing | Once the survey closes |
| Private | Only ever to you |
After answering is the usual choice, because visible early totals measurably change later answers. If you want a genuine read on what people think, do not show them the running score first.
Who can answer
Anybody with the link, including people without an Ardent account, or only people you invite. Either way, one person cannot answer twice.
Invitations go out as a personal, single-use link. Ardent stores a one-way code of the address rather than a readable list of who was invited, so a lost link is re-issued rather than looked up.
If you publish your results, an invitation batch has to cover a whole group rather than a selection from one. Inviting the people likely to agree with you and publishing the answers as though they came from everybody is a push poll, and it is refused rather than discouraged.
Reading the results
You get totals, charts, and written answers.
On an anonymous survey, breakdowns that would identify somebody are withheld from you as well. Narrowing an anonymous survey to a handful of people would undo the promise made to them, so the tools do not allow it. That is deliberate, and it applies to the person who created the survey.
You can export responses from an identified survey. Exporting an anonymous one is refused: a row-by-row file is the single thing that would undo anonymity.
Written answers
Comments on an anonymous survey are checked automatically before you see them, so abusive text, or text that would identify somebody, is held back.
If that check is unavailable, answers stay hidden rather than being shown. You will see that some are being held, never what they say. This is the safe direction, and it means an outage looks like a small number of withheld answers rather than a privacy incident.
Closing and archiving
There are three ways a survey stops taking answers, and they read differently to the person answering.
- A closing date. After it passes, answers are refused. The date shows on the survey and beside it in the directory, so somebody deciding whether to start knows how long they have.
- A response limit. Once the number of answers reaches it, the survey is full. This is refused loudly rather than ignored quietly: an answer that was not counted while appearing to be accepted is worse than being told the survey is full.
- Closing it yourself.
Closing stops new answers and keeps everything you have collected.
Archiving goes further: it destroys the codes that stop one person answering twice, so responses can never be linked to anything again.
Archiving cannot be undone, and an archived survey cannot be reopened, because it could no longer keep its one-answer-per-person promise. You are asked to confirm.
What people are told before they answer
Worth knowing, because it is what makes the answers worth having:
- Whether the survey is anonymous or identified
- When the results become visible
- On an anonymous survey, that their response cannot be found, changed, downloaded or deleted afterwards, by them or by us, because nothing identifies which one was theirs
That last point is the honest cost of real anonymity, and it is said up front rather than buried.
Where polls and surveys appear
A survey has its own page and a short link you can share anywhere. It can be attached to a post so it appears in the feed, and public ones can be listed in the public directory.
Answering never appears in anybody's feed, activity or notifications. Publishing a survey is news; answering one is nobody else's business.
Related
- Ardent Social: posting, and running a quick poll inside a post
- Safety: reporting content and how moderation decisions work
- Support: if something is not behaving as described here
Last updated: 24 August 2026