How survey links behave

Worth knowing before you send one, because most of this cannot be undone.

A link is single-use

A link is reusable until someone submits an answer. On submit it is destroyed: the link stops working and the response is recorded.

Reopening a consumed link shows the same neutral "not available" page as an expired one. A respondent cannot tell the two apart, and neither can you from the outside — use Retrieve a survey link instead, which returns 404 once a link is gone.

Expiry

expires_at is optional and defaults to 30 days. It must be at least 60 seconds in the future and at most two years out.

Expired links render the same unavailable page. There is no grace period.

Identity is set by the sender, not the recipient

author_name, author_email and author_url describe the person you sent the link to. They can only be set when the link is minted — never from the URL.

That distinction is deliberate. A query string is editable by whoever holds the link, so accepting identity from it would let a recipient attribute their answer to a colleague, and would leak the original recipient's address through a forwarded URL.

The account fields — customer_name, customer_id, customer_url — behave the same way: what you set when minting is what reaches Zefi.

Segments and size

segments accepts up to 50 entries of up to 100 characters.

Metadata travels to the survey app inside a size-limited context. If yours is large enough to exceed it, segments are dropped and identity is kept — a response attributed to the right person with no segments is more useful than the reverse. Keep segments modest if you also care about them.

Revoking a link

DELETE on a link revokes it immediately: 204, and the link stops working. Deleting a link that never existed, or has already been consumed, returns 404.

Revoking is not reversible. Mint a new link instead.