Creating a comment question

How to an open-ended question & Advance setting options

Tyree Dickerson avatar
Written by Tyree Dickerson
Updated over a week ago

Sometimes you may want to ask an open-ended question on your survey to gather your participants' thoughts on a topic.

To add an open ended question, scroll down to the Survey Questions and Dynamic Content section of your project on the Page & Survey tab, and click the Add Question button.

The Create a new question menu will appear:

Under the Open Ended section, select one of the three comment question types:

  • Comment

  • One Line Comment

  • or Idea Board

Then enter your question prompt:

e.g. "Tell us your thoughts about the city's new project."

A question dialog box will appear, where you can edit the question prompt if you choose. Within the question dialog box, under the Comment Display, you can opt to collect comments publicly or privately. Public comments will be visible under the question on the live project site.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If comments are set to private initially, you won't be able to make any privately submitted comments public at any time if/after changing this setting. This is by design to ensure participants who wish to submit their comments privately can do so without fear of those comments being made public.

The toggle settings below the comment privacy options allow you to:

  • Collect name and email

  • Require name and email (must enable the collect name and email option above)

  • Publicize the Participant's name with their comment

  • Allow participants to submit their comment(s) privately*
    *Comment cannot be made public at a later time by Project Admin(s)

  • Allow participants to flag other participant's comments for admin review

  • Display text comments/responses publicly

  • Use machine learning to flag toxic comments (highly recommended)

  • Provide a real-time civility feedback notice as the participant types

These options are green when enabled (toggled on.)

Continue reading below to see how to use the Advanced Options tab to create custom text for comment boxes and buttons.


If you'd like to further edit your question with text specific to your survey, click the Advanced Options button.

Click the text box under Comment Button Text to edit the button.


You can edit the Comment Box Placeholder in the same way.


Click Save Advanced Options at the bottom of the window to save your changes.


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