I’d like to suggest a small improvement for how responses are saved. At the moment, when you run an experiment or survey on Pavlovia, data is saved either on the server or locally (if you’re piloting). The problem is that if your internet connection drops right when a participant finishes, you get a “failed to fetch” error and the data is lost.
It would be really helpful if responses could be saved both to the server and locally at the same time. That way, there’s always a backup in case the upload fails. Maybe this could just be a simple toggle option that researchers can turn on or off depending on their needs.
We can certainly see this issue, especially for our researchers working in schools and hospitals. Our thinking so far is that this would be annoying especially for users on mobile devices like ipads where the concept of saving the local file, and knowing where to fetch/send that, is a little bit vague. You’ve also got the issue of needing to be online to start the experiment (which isn’t always possible if you’re in a hospital or remote location) and the issue of getting participants to send back their data.
Our thought was that we could solve this best with a dedicated app for Pavlovia on mobile devices that allows you to download experiments in advance, then go offline and ,whenever the system device gets back online, it can send the data automatically back to Pavlovia. We’re currently testing the Android version of this, should hopefully be ready for public beta soon, with an iOS version to follow (early in the new year?)
It’s great to hear about the upcoming Android app. That will certainly make things much smoother in many contexts, especially for fieldwork.
What I had in mind, though, was something simpler for the browser-based version: an option on the initial screen when participants access the experiment link, asking whether they’d like to save a local copy of their responses.
In my situation, even when we run studies in the lab, internet instability can still cause problems. If the connection drops during or before the final upload, we lose that participant’s data. That’s not a limitation of Pavlovia itself but a constraint of our local infrastructure - and unfortunately a reality in many research contexts here in the global south. Having an automatic local backup would help prevent that.