Disable creator/editor fields for a survey shared to a group or organization for anonymous survey submission?

[NW-AllyBuccanero-GISS]

I'm creating a safety survey for my organization to capture near miss incidents. I would like the survey to be submitted anonymously. Is there a way to disable the capture of creator/editor fields? I have disabled tracking in the feature service settings, but the creator/editor fields are still displayed in the data table view on Survey123 and through exported formats like CSV. Allowing members of my organization to submit a survey anonymously helps to encourage honesty and creates a safe space to share concerns about safety in our workplace. The other option would be making the survey open to the public, but I need organizational permission to do this and would rather not have the survey open to the public when it's only intended for my organization.

[Anonymous User]

Hi Allyson,

To remove the editor tracking fields, you need to turn off the option in the Settings page of the feature layer, the one you want to turn off is "Keep track of who created and last updated features." and then you will need to manually delete the 4 fields from the feature layer. Turning this setting off does not delete the fields, just makes them inactive.

More info on deleting fields from ArcGIS Online hosted feature layers can be found here: Work with fields—ArcGIS Online Help | ArcGIS 

Phil.

[NW-AllyBuccanero-GISS]

Thanks for the response, Phil. Good idea for trying to get those fields deleted. Unfortunately, the creator/editor fields are locked fields in the data. I tried turning editing controls on/off in the feature layer settings to see if it would unlock. I also looked at editing controls in the pop-up configuration, and there the option for display can be toggled, but turning editing on or off is disabled. 

[NW-AllyBuccanero-GISS · Accepted solution]

After a lot of testing, the anonymous survey is possible! When creator/editor tracking is turned off, all of tracking fields (creator/editor and dates) are still present in the data table and locked, so they can't be deleted. But the creator/editor fields are not populated with the username of the survey taker, they are populated with the username of the survey owner. In this case, it was my username coming up either way; I had to have a coworker login and take a test survey to realize this. This works the same way for surveys shared with the public and those shared within your organization. 

Happy anonymous survey taking!