Media links and who can open them
Photos, videos, and documents in a project are reached by a link that never expires. Some of those links open for anyone; most ask the person to be signed in to the workspace running the study.
A project holds two kinds of file, and Strella treats them differently.
The materials you show a participant (stimulus images, consent forms, terms documents, your brand assets) open for anyone holding the link. The people who read them have no Strella account: someone sitting in an interview, a panelist reading a non-disclosure agreement on a recruiting vendor's site, a participant on a phone app. There is nothing for them to sign in to, so the link itself is the access.
Everything else asks the person to be signed in to the workspace that owns the study. That covers a participant's uploaded photo or video answer, the session recording, and files you attach to a project chat. Anyone else gets a "not found" page, including a teammate signed in to a different workspace.
A "not found" page is what a refused request looks like. It is deliberately the same page you would get for a file that does not exist, so nobody can use a link to work out whether a file is there.
Deleting a project
Deleting a project switches off the media that needs a sign-in, for everyone, straight away: participant answers, session recordings, and your chat attachments. That includes the links inside a results export somebody downloaded months ago.
The materials you show participants work differently. A stimulus image, consent form, terms document, or brand asset keeps opening for anyone holding its link after the project is deleted. This is deliberate. Duplicating a project leaves the copy reading the original's files, so switching those files off would blank the stimuli of a study you are still running, mid-interview.
If a document already circulating needs to stop opening, ask Strella to erase it. Erasure removes the stored file itself, which deleting the project does not.
Restoring the project brings back the media that needs a sign-in. Deleting is reversible, and so is this.
Moving a project to another workspace
The project's media moves with it, all of it: participant answers, chat attachments, and session recordings alike. The new workspace can open everything, and the previous workspace can open none of it.
Exported results
A results export contains full links to these files. The links keep working, but only for someone signed in to the workspace that owns the study. Sending the spreadsheet to a stakeholder outside it does not give them the media. They also stop working if the project is deleted.
The address in your browser bar
Opening one of these files sends you on to a temporary address at the storage provider. You will not notice this in normal use, because opening the file again simply issues a fresh one.
It only shows up if you copy the address out of your browser bar after the redirect and try to use that copy the next day. Copies of files that need a sign-in stop working after twelve hours. For interview materials, which have no sign-in check anyway, the copy lasts a week.