Conditional and Optional Questions Are Live

Two new things you can do to a question in rifts.to: mark it optional, or require it only when an earlier answer says it applies. Both are part of rifts.to Pro, which starts with a 14-day free trial.

The case it is for

Question 1: did you attend the Thursday workshop? Yes or no. Question 2: what would you change about it?

Question 2 is a good question for the forty people who were in the room and an impossible one for everyone else. Until this week it was mandatory for both, because every question in a rifts.to survey was. So the people who weren't there typed "n/a" or shut the tab — noise you filter out by hand, or every answer after it lost.

What you can set

Every question in the builder now carries an Answer rules row:

• Required — the default, and what every question has always been.
• Optional — the respondent can leave it and still submit.
• Required when… — required only when your conditions are met.

A condition reads [earlier question] is [option]. Pick several options in one condition to mean "any of these", add up to five conditions, and say whether all of them must match or any one. The workshop case is a single condition. A retro question you only want from people who said the sprint went badly and that they were blocked is two, joined with All.

Respondents see an Optional marker on any question that isn't currently required, and it moves as they answer. Tick "No" on question 1 and question 2 marks itself optional underneath them.

Required, not hidden

Most tools that sell conditional logic hide questions. This does not. Everyone still sees every question, and the rules only decide what has to be answered.

Hiding would cost you the dashboard. Eleven answers from ninety respondents means one thing if all ninety saw the question and something else if twelve did, and nothing in your results says which. Keep every question visible and a low count means one thing: people skipped it. If you need branches hidden from the reader, this is not that.

What it will not let you build

A condition can only point at a multiple choice question above it. Free-text and rating questions cannot trigger anything, and question 4 cannot depend on question 7 — pointing backwards is what stops you building two questions that each wait on the other.

Editing cleans up after itself. Delete a question a rule points at, or drop an option it names, and that condition goes and the question flips back to Required in front of you, instead of failing on save with an error about a question further down the page.

One note for anyone posting from a script

POST /api/respond has never refused an incomplete submission. It does now: a missing required answer returns 400 where it used to return 201.

Getting it

Answer rules are part of Pro — $11.99 a month, with a 14-day free trial. Answering stays free: respondents never meet a paywall, and your survey keeps behaving the way you built it even if the subscription lapses. A question you marked required stays required for as long as that survey collects answers.

Start your free trial, then add a multiple choice question, put a second question under it, and set that one to "Required when…".