Error logs have been created, what should I do?

Question

Hi,

There are 3 error log created today in my study. I posted the study 10 days ago and it didn't have any problem until now. What should I do with there error code? Are they serious?

Error #129 - Can't find file _path.cgi. Looked in: /home/chrootSki/home/Ski/admin/_path.cgi;/home/chrootSki/home/Ski//admin/_path.cgi;/home/chrootSki/home/Ski/cgi-bin/_path.cgi
Mon Mar 31 20:50:11 2014
SSIWebVersion= 8_2_4 params= IP= 155.99.230.37 , client= Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.74.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.2 Safari/537.74.9


Error #102 - Study name passed in is empty. Cannot find study name.
Wed Apr 2 05:02:36 2014
SSIWebVersion= 8_2_4 params= studynameski=>, IP= 199.73.12.14 , client= Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)


Error #102 - Study name passed in is empty. Cannot find study name.
Wed Apr 2 05:04:34 2014
SSIWebVersion= 8_2_4 params= IP= 205.134.240.44 , client= Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1025 Safari/532.5

Best,

Answer 1

Usually this indicates that there was an issue with the link a respondent clicked to reach the survey, or there is a web crawler attempting to access the survey.  

If a respondent clicked a broken link, then they would receive this message because the link to the survey did not contain the study name, so the software didn't know which survey to give them.  

In the case of a web crawler, these often are triggered by a respondent's browser toolbar (Yahoo! toolbar, etc.) that attempts to "rate" pages. It will take a page that the respondent has requested, and then try to index all other pages around it by guessing web addresses.  When they guess wrong, it can sometimes trigger these error messages. We also have security measures in place to prevent web crawlers from accessing your survey, resulting in these error messages from time to time.