Latest Contributions by Caitlin_Dickinson

Anonymously submitted surveys are an important use case of Survey123 in our organization. For example, university researchers may need to protect the identity of those submitting responses, but want to limit it to a specific group,  or we may send out surveys to collect anonymous feedback, and want to ensure users feel safe providing honest answers (echoed here).  While publicly-shared surveys allow anonymous users to submit responses, if a user is signed into an ArcGIS Online organization via Survey123 in their browser window, it will record their username in the editor tracking fields of the hosted feature layer by default. As the editor tracking fields are not exposed by default in the Data tab of Survey123, survey owners may not even realize this is happening.  To avoid recording usernames in the underlying hosted feature service, surveys published via the web designer require the following steps, which to my knowledge are only documented in answers to Esri Community posts:  Change the settings of the hosted feature layer by deselecting “keep track of who created and last updated features” Manually delete the “Editor” and “Creator” fields from the hosted feature layer Unfortunately, deleting these fields breaks the ability to update the “Share results” tab, as the service definition cannot be updated (error: “invalid definition for 'EditorTrackingInfo”). Additionally, anytime the survey is republished, this configuration would be erased.  The idea: have an option when creating a survey in the web designer to make all submissions anonymous (no editor tracking), regardless of the sharing setting (public, organization, group). While this might limit what submitters could do (obviously anything that requires tracking), it would ensure survey owners clearly know when usernames are being recorded or not. Additionally, as it is recommended to control sharing and privileges through the collaborate tab, it would make sense to incorporate this option directly into the web designer, rather than having users make changes to the underlying feature service, which can cause unexpected issues down the line (such as the issue cited above with "Share results").  I’ll add that this would be particularly helpful for our organization members (of which there are 7000+)  that are not power users of Survey123 or ArcGIS Online (and may not be familiar with the inner workings of editor tracking), but are utilizing this great tool for their research or teaching. ... View more

Currently, creating groups with update capabilities is an administrative privilege that can be assigned to a custom role. We’ve enabled our entire university community (6000+ users) to have this privilege in order to facilitate collaborative editing of StoryMaps, Web Apps, Web Maps, etc., which is a common need in class assignments and research projects (see collaboration models for ArcGIS Online). Assigning this privilege to a custom role which we automatically grant to new users relieves us of the administrative burden of creating groups for everyone that would like to collaborate on content.  There is, however, an unfortunate side effect of this being an administrative privilege. When connecting to the GIS in ArcGIS Notebooks, every user now gets a warning stating they are signed in with an administrator role, and to proceed with caution: This is misleading and causes confusion, as our users do not have the administrator role assigned to them. Given that users without this ‘create group with update capabilities’ can be members of shared update groups, and edit content therein, I’m not sure what distinguishes this as an administrative privilege.  I’m proposing that ‘create a group with update capabilities’ be made a non-administrative privilege in order to more easily facilitate collaboration amongst users. ... View more

A frequent request from our university community members that use StoryMaps is the ability to provide in-text citations hyperlinked to the credits section. This would be particularly useful for academic writing, class assignments, and research communication where in-text citations are common.   While the new navigation bar button for the credits section is a great improvement, it would be ideal if in-text citations could be linked directly to the credits section.  ... View more