Hit a 400 or 500 error in the admin panel? What to do

Hit a 400 or 500 error in the admin panel? What to do

Sometimes the LimeSurvey Cloud admin panel shows an error such as 400 Bad Request, 500 Internal Server Error, or a message about a CSRF token. It can happen while saving a question, opening the editor, or adding participants.

These errors look scary, but they are usually caused by something on our platform — not by anything you did. In most cases there is no setting you can change to fix them yourself. Your part is to tell us about it.

Try this first

Before you contact support, run through these quick checks:

  1. Reload the page.
  2. Try a different browser, or a private (incognito) window.
  3. Wait a few minutes and try again. Some incidents are fixed platform-wide very quickly.

If the error is gone, you are done. If it comes back, go to the next section.

What to send support

Contact support and include these four things:

  1. The exact error text, or a screenshot of it.
  2. What you were doing, step by step, when the error appeared (for example: "I opened survey X, clicked Save on question 3, then the error showed").
  3. Your survey ID.
  4. Your browser (for example: Chrome, Firefox, Safari).

What happens next

  1. Support may ask for your written consent to access your installation and investigate. Replying "I agree" is enough. You never need to share your password.
  2. Typically our engineers fix the problem on the server side.
  3. When it is fixed, we reply with "resolved, please confirm". Please try the same action again and let us know if it works.

There is one exception: errors caused by a custom theme may need an engineer to repair your installation.

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