Compatibility & Troubleshooting

This page is primarily for those who are having problems submitting survey results. There have been a number of documented cases of users being unable to submit survey data. In most cases this is the result of one of two things:

• A bug in the browser software - Some versions of America Online's web browser have known bugs relating to forms handling. AOL recommends trying one of two things: first attempt to turn off some setting in the browser relating to "compressed graphics", or second (recommended) go to keyword "NETSCAPE" on AOL and download the Netscape browser and Winsock software - this is definitely the best route to go since Netscape is the standard, and moving away from AOL's browser and using Winsock will also allow you to access other services and features. (and SURVEY.NET looks 1000% nicer through Netscape or Internet Explorer)

• Another possibility is that you have limited system resources (either temporarily or the result of minimal RAM or hard drive space). Microsoft Windows (all versions) is not reknown for being efficient in handling memory allocation (and de-allocation), therefore it's entirely possible that if you have a lot of applications active, or previously ran a program on the machine which may have left a "memory hole", that your system may be unstable and you're unaware of this. If you've been working on your computer all day, it's a smart move to occasionally shut down all applications and reboot just to make sure that there aren't any remnants from previous programs that can cause problems. The beauty of Windows is that quite often, the program that crashes may not be the program that's actually misbehaving - it could be something you ran an hour ago.

  Contrary to what you might have heard about minimum system requirements, especially in the area of RAM, they are usually too minimum for some intensive applications. If you're running Windows with less than 8 Megs of RAM on the Internet, there's always a possibility that your system will run out of resources.

Receiving a warning message about multiple survey submissions when you've only submitted a survey for the first time...

Some systems, namely America Online and Prodigy and similar networks provide internet access through a Firewall - what this means is that SURVEY.NET cannot uniquely identify users. As a result, there is a possibility that you might get a warning message which tells you your survey results are not going to be counted - the system thinks you are trying to "spam" the survey and is issuing a warning.

In some cases you did nothing wrong - it's simply a question of timing - if too many people hit SURVEY.NET from the same Firewall, the system may reject one or more of the submissions. The best thing to do is wait a little while and try again - there's not a whole lot I can do to compensate for this without exposing the survey data to possible tampering. I encourage the major online services to deal with this issue - they can and should provide a means for outside systems to uniquely identify users.

For more information, consult the SURVEY.NET Frequently-Asked Questions page.