WatuPRO: Cleanup Database Space

By default WatuPRO stores every user’s answer to every question in your database. This allows us to show you this data any time and perform useful reports on it. As the time goes and you are collecting a lot of data from many users and quizzes, your database can become really big. This might be a problem if you are using a shared host or other way limited resources.

So here is what you can do. Have in mind that any solution that reduces data means this data will no longer be available to you and will no longer participate in reports.

When Your Database Is Already Large

If you have not prevented the database from growing and already have too much of it, you will need to clean it up. There are several options:

a) Deleting whole quizzes. If there are quizzes you no longer need, and don’t need the stats from them, you can simply delete them. This will save most space but obviously isn’t ideal in most cases.

b) Delete user submitted data on the quiz. You can save a lot of space by doing this. Go to Quizzes -> View Results and you’ll see a checkbox at the bottom: “Show me a button to cleanup all submitted data on this quiz.”. Click on it, then click on “Cleanup all data” button.
You can do this on every quiz on which you don’t need the data.

c) Blank out data on a quiz. Blanking out the data will save less DB space, but will leave the points, grades, percentage correct answers etc. This way most of your reports and stats will remain unchanged and you’ll still have less used DB space.

Preventing Too Much Data

As usual prevention is easier than cure. Depending on how much of the user submitted data you need, you have several options to reduce DB space usage:

a) Don’t store any data. This is configurable on per-quiz basis. You need to go to Edit Quiz -> Advanced Settings tab and select the following option:

” Don’t store any data / results of this quiz in the database. “

That’s it.

b) Automatically cleanup or blank out data. This option is global and affects all quizzes so be careful with it. It’s available on your WatuPRO Settings page:

cleanup

You can for example choose to cleanup only data older than 30 days, or 180 days etc.

[WatuPRO] Don’t Display Already Answered Questions To Logged In User

This feature requires Watu PRO version 5.1.7 or newer and can be used on quizzes that require user log in. The idea is that when user retakes the quiz they won’t see questions already answered in a previous attempt (even if same question was used in another quiz).

The setting will be available on quizzes that meet ALL of the following criteria:

  • The quiz requires user log in (before version 5.1.7 more criteria were required)

The setting is accessible from the User and Email Related Settings tab:

Be careful with this setting and the number of attempts you allow on a quiz. If the user answers all the questions in previous attempts, they will again end up with a quiz with no questions at some point. In such case the user will be shown a message”There are no questions to answer. Looks like you have already answered them all! “. You may want to avoid this by controlling the number of questions and number of attempts. Especially watch out for cases when multiple quizzes reuse the same pool of questions.

From version 6.2.8.6 you can choose the option “In case no more questions are available, start over” to avoid this.

WatuPRO 5.1

The quiz plugin WatuPRO just hit version 5.1. Below is the list of changes and improvements between 5.0 and 5.1:

  • New mode for grades calculation: when you select to calculate quiz grades by percent you can also choose whether to calculate percent of correct answers or percent points achieved from the maximum possible points. This gives you greater flexibility for quizzes with more complicated and versatile questions.
  • Honeypot field option is available against spam bot submissions. Using a “honey pot” is a lot less obtrusive than captchas because it does not require the end user to do anything, while the efficiency is almost the same. You can  enable the new feature from the Edit Quiz -> General Settings tab.
  • A new field on the Grades form lets you specify URL where to redirect the user upon achieving the grade. The old option to use the grade title as URL still works, but is less convenient.
  • Added mass activate / mass deactivate buttons on the Manage Questions page.
  • New quiz taking counter shortcode lets you show how many attempts are allowed total or left for the current user on a given  quiz. The shortcode is watupro-quiz-attempt, see the internal Help page for usage examples.
  • The Quiz categories table will now show who each category is accessible to (roles or user groups).
  • Added %%CATEGORY-PERCENTAGEOFMAX-X%% variable to manually display the % from maximum points collected on a category.
  • New shortcode lets you display a simplified version of the “View results” page of a quiz on the front-end. You’ll find the shortcode for each quiz on its “View results” page in admin.
  • [Intelligence module] Now in personality quizzes the points given to answers can be used to give more weight to a selected answer-to-personality match. By default each match counts as one point.
  • [Intelligence module] New option lets you turn the blank spaces in “Fill the gaps” question into drop-down selectors. More info at https://blog.calendarscripts.info/turn-multiple-answer-gaps-into-drop-downs-watupro-intelligence-module-v-5-0-2/
  • [Intelligence module] The Match / Matrix questions have been fully reworked with a new UI. The new interface is more user-friendly and works better on mobile devices. The old legacy format can still be used but we won’t provide technical support for it.
  • [Intelligence module] The Dependencies section now supports all or any mode (i.e. you can require all dependencies to be satisfied or just one of them).
  • [Intelligence module] The expand-personality-result shortcode now accepts argument “chart” to produce a basic bar chart.
  • [Reporting Module] The user Overview page now shows total points and avg. % correct answer.
  • Grade management editor made smaller so you can see more of the grades on screen
  • Critical bug fix for WP 4.4: After updating to WP 4.4 on some installations submitting a quiz let to a database error and the results were not submitted.
  • Fixed bug: after introducing multi-quiz certificates, the regular certificates were always issued to non-logged in users.
  • Fixed bugs with dependencies in Intelligence module: “any” mode worked correctly only when the first dependency was satisfied. The locked-test info did not show correctly satisfied dependencies with % correct answers mode.
  • Fixed bug: when “Ask for contact” field label contained an apostrophe the whole setting was not properly saved.
  • Fixed bug: [Intelligence module] when sending email for editing submitted quiz details the email contents did not have proper line breaks.
  • Fixed bug [Intelligence module]: in fill the gaps questions. When multiple correct answers were given without “dropdown mode” selected the last answer was not properly recognized as correct.
  • Fixed bug [Intelligence module]: the exact answer feedback did not work on Slider questions.
  • Fixed bug [Intelligence module]: slider questions did not work in “no ajax” mode.
  • Fixed bug [Intelligence module]: When “Reveal the correct answers on unanswered and wrongly answered fields in “Fill the gaps” questions” was chosen, the answers were revealed even in the %%UNRESOLVED%% variable.

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