Inviting participants - wiso-forschungslabor/hroot-documentation GitHub Wiki
Once you have setup your sessions and assigned pool members to an experiment, you probably want them to sign up for sessions. To tell pool members about upcoming session there is the invitation feature. Nevertheless a participant which is assigned to an experiment can register for its sessions once registration is active, whether they got an invitation or not.
Table of Contents
- Configuring emails for an experiment
- Sending invitations
- Status of the invitation process
- Stopping the invitation process
- Other ways of sending invitations
- Opening/Closing for registration
1. Configuring emails for an experiment
Before you send out invitations you should adapt the email texts for the experiment according to your needs. When creating an experiment the email texts are filled with the default from Site Settings -> Participant Texts. Most of the times these defaults will do, but often there some details differing from the defaults and if the defaults are changed after the creation of an experiment, the texts in the experiments are not changed. How to build the email templates is described in the sending Messages section.
2. Sending invitations
Invitation on the left menu after clicking on an Experiment opens the page for starting the sending of invitation mails.
To the left it is possible to set how many mails should be send in one time interval and the time between two intervals. Sending out emails in smaller intervals with an longer interval in between ensures a minimum of randomization. Expecting pool members to only sign up after they got an invitation with information about upcoming sessions.
To the right is an overview over the number of assigned participants not in a session and the number of participants without an invitation. Based on the later there is an estimation how long the invitation process will take, with the current interval settings. The duration of sending the emails out and a maximum of emails per time interval is limited by the system. This second limitation can not be taken into account by HROOT.
Generally the order in which the invitation mails will be send is randomized, but it is possible to check the box "invite participants with lesser registrations first". If this option is used, the invitations for pool members with zero participation will be send first, with randomization between these, then the invitations for pool members with one participation and so forth.
The green button "open experiment for registration and start sending invitations" opens the experiment for registration and starts the invitation process. If some assigned participants already got an invitation they will not be invited again. Participants signed up for a session won't get an invitation as well.
Please be aware, that a short interval and a high number of mails per interval will cause some load on your mail server.
For sending invitations experimenters need the access right "manage invitations".
3. Status of the invitation process
Once you have started an invitation the "Send invitations" page will show the status of the running invitation process. The following information is displayed:
- Time and date the process was started
- Number of emails per interval and time in between
- Total number of assigned participants
- Number of already invited participants
- How many invitations could have been sent regarding the settings
- How many invitations actually have been sent
- How many participants still can get an invitation
- How many places are still available in all of the experiments sessions
The information is updated every 60 seconds. The remaining time till the next update is shown in the upper right.
You will get this screen, even when there are no emails to be sent. For example when there are no sessions. The checks if there are mails to be send are integrated in the email process which runs usually every minute and not in the information screen.
4. Stopping the invitation process
The invitation process will stop automatically if there are no more free places in all sessions of the experiment, since there would be no more session dates to include in the invitation emails. If there are no free places in an experiment when you start the invitation process, there won't be send any emails at all.
If there is an invitation process running, you can stop the process manually using the button on the status page.
Once the invitation process is stopped you can start a new one with new parameters to the remaining assigned participants without an invitation or sending new invitations to all participants (see below).
5. Other ways of sending invitations
The orange button "start sending invitations TO ALL participants" works similar to the green one, except it sends invitations to all assigned participants even if they already got an invitation. For this case there is a separate estimated duration of the invitation process to the right of the button.
The randomization works in the same way and participants already signed up in a session won't get an invitation.
Internally this function just resets the information if an invitation was already sent. Therefore all information about previous invitations is removed when this button is used.
6. Opening/Closing for registration
There are two states regarding the possibility for participants to sign up for sessions. Either the registration is active or inactive. The current state is displayed in the top right corner when you are working within the context of an experiment. The button is red when registration is not possible and green when it is possible.
The current state is also displayed in the experiment list.
With a click on the button in the top right corner the state can be switched from inactive to active and vice versa. When an invitation process is started, the state is set to active automatically.
Closing the experiment for registration does not change anything else. A already started invitation process will go on, sending out session dates which will not be available to pool members once they log in, due to the inactive registration. All already signed up participants will remain in their sessions.
Closing an experiment for registration can help you, when you have to rearrange or delete sessions. Preventing participants to sign up for sessions you want to move or delete. But remember to reopen the registration afterwards.