Hi @Kal_Lam @stephanealoo thanks for taking a look. Yes, as mentioned the links work fine when accessed directly (or from a website). It just seems to be when the links are opened from Office365 (e.g. MS Word) that there is a problem - even though the URLs being opened are for sure correct.
Having looked at this more, it seems that most times when there’s an issue there is not one but two browser tabs opened - one tab will have the survey opening correctly, and the other tab will have the modern browser error page. It’s about a 50/50 chance as to which tab will open first (i.e. sometimes the user will see the error page (with the survey in the tab behind) and other times the user will see the survey page (with the error page in the tab behind).
My hypothesis: I now suspect this is to do with how Word opens links in general (under the hood using Microsoft Office Protocol Discovery) and it’s just that I haven’t come across this before because when we previously sent out links in a Word document we were using a very old Kobo/Enketo server version (that hadn’t yet deprecated IE) so we never hit any error messages then.
My reasoning:
clicking links from Office will be slow as well, even if you don’t use Internet Explorer as your default browser. […] It first uses an Internet Explorer component to see if the URL one clicks is valid. It does not identify itself as Internet Explorer; in the access logs one might see:
User Agent: Microsoft Office Existence DiscoveryAfter that, it hands the resulting URL to the default browser.
(quoted from:)
I therefore think that when Word sends the first request using the IE component Enketo thinks it’s using an old browser, then when it opens the link for real it uses the browser that the user has as their default.
Other links that reference URLs opening twice from MS apps:
SO… we may need to issue guidance to our users to copy and paste the URL rather than clicking on it directly from Office apps.
If there is a way for Enketo to identify if a given request is from Office Discovery and treat it as though it as a modern browser (rather than treating it as IE) that would be magnificent (assuming my hypothesis is correct!).
Thanks all for your efforts
