Publishing
A campaign has two versions at once: the one you are editing, and the one participants are answering. Publishing replaces the second with the first.
Everything you change is saved to your draft as you work. Nobody sees any of it until you publish, so there is no such thing as half-changing a live campaign.
Previewing
The preview walks your draft exactly as a participant would see it, without publishing anything. You can step through every page, answer questions, and follow the routes your rules create.
It can also be run as a particular participant and through a particular distribution, which is how you check that a rule keyed on someone's details behaves, or that a distribution's variable overrides say what you meant.
Preview answers are kept out of your results, your exports and your participation checks. A preview does not count as having taken part, and will not stop that person answering for real later.
Rewards in a preview are real. A preview that reaches a point where a behaviour fires awards it to whoever the preview is running as, for real, in their activity stream. Preview as yourself, or as a test user, rather than as a customer.
Publishing changes
Publishing opens a review of everything that has changed since the last one, grouped by where you changed it, and it is worth reading rather than clicking past. It exists to answer one question: what will this do to the campaign that is already running?
Three kinds of warning appear there.
Changes that affect answers already collected. Deleting a question deletes its answers from Results. Removing options from a question deletes the tallies for those options, while the question keeps its total, so the remaining percentages will no longer add up. Renaming an option shows old answers under the new label as though it had always been there.
Changes that end sessions in progress. See below.
Deletions that destroy collected responses. Deleting a distribution takes its responses with it when you publish, and your campaign totals fall accordingly.
When a publish would destroy responses or end sessions, the review asks you to type a confirmation before it will go ahead.
What ends sessions in progress
Most publishes disturb nobody. Someone half way through a campaign carries on, and the changes reach whoever starts next.
Three changes are different, because they restructure the campaign in a way a half-finished session cannot be carried across:
- Moving a page to a different position.
- Moving a question to a different page.
- Deleting a distribution.
If you publish one of these while people are part way through, their sessions end and their partial answers are not recorded. The review tells you how many people that is at the moment you publish.
Everything else is safe in this respect. Editing wording, adding or deleting a question, changing logic, changing settings, changing rewards: all of it reaches new participants without disturbing anyone already answering.
Discarding changes
Discarding throws away your draft and returns it to the version currently published.
It does not touch the live campaign. Participants keep answering the version published last, exactly as they were, and that is true both before and after you discard. Discarding also cancels any distribution you had marked for deletion.
Resetting to draft
Resetting is the destructive one, and it is worth being precise about what it does.
It throws away the published version, so the campaign stops accepting anyone until you publish again. It keeps your draft, so none of your work is lost. And it permanently deletes every session and every result: responses, completions, question tallies, all of it.
Use it to clear a campaign's history after testing, before it goes to a real audience. Do not use it to unpublish something temporarily. Switching the campaign inactive does that without losing anything. See campaign settings.
Cloning
Cloning copies a campaign into a new one, with its pages, questions, logic and settings, and none of its results. It is the safe way to try a substantial rework, and the usual way to run this year's version of last year's campaign.
Publishing and distributions
Distributions do not publish on their own. Publishing the campaign publishes them with it, including ones you have created since the last publish and ones you have marked for deletion.
This is why a new distribution serves nobody until the campaign is published, however its own switches are set. See Distributions.