Live results stopped updating

Your responses are safe. Every answer a respondent submits is saved the moment they submit it, whether or not your dashboard shows it right away. Nothing is lost.

Reload the admin page. The count you see after reloading is the real, current count, pulled fresh from the database rather than from the live feed. If people kept answering while your screen was frozen, reloading will catch you up.

What is actually happening

The dashboard keeps a live connection open so new answers appear on screen without you refreshing. That connection can drop for ordinary reasons: a spotty network, a laptop going to sleep, a browser tab that got backgrounded, a projector or hotel network that resets idle connections. Your browser normally reconnects on its own within a few seconds, and answers submitted after it reconnects will appear normally.

The gap is between "the connection dropped" and "the connection came back." Any answer submitted during that gap will not appear on screen automatically. It is still recorded. It shows up as soon as you reload, or once your browser finishes reconnecting and someone submits another answer that pushes the count forward.

If the dashboard shows a reconnecting notice, that is your browser actively retrying, not an error. Give it a moment. If it does not clear within thirty seconds or so, reload the page.

If this happens during a live presentation

You do not need to stop and troubleshoot in front of an audience. Reload once, keep talking, and check the count again. The survey itself keeps accepting answers the entire time regardless of what your screen shows.

To reduce how often it happens

• Use a stable connection where you can. A venue's public wifi is the most common cause.
• Keep the admin tab active rather than backgrounded. Some browsers slow down or pause tabs that lose focus, which can delay reconnecting.
• If you present from a laptop that sleeps or dims aggressively, disable that for the duration of the session.
• If your admin tab has been open for a long time, such as since before you started your presentation, closing and reopening it from your admin link gives you a fresh connection rather than one that has been reconnecting quietly in the background for a while.

What this does not mean

A frozen count on your screen has no effect on your respondents. Their form still loads, still accepts an answer, and still confirms submission, all independent of whether your admin dashboard happens to be connected at that moment. The live feed is a convenience for you as the presenter, not a gate on whether the survey is working.

It also does not mean the survey closed or expired. That is a separate state with its own message on the respondent's screen, and it looks nothing like a stalled count on your dashboard.

If reloading never restores the count, or the number stays at zero despite people telling you they submitted an answer, check whether respondents actually reached your survey at all. That is a different problem, covered in the article below on getting no responses.