Edit a study after launch

You don't have to get everything right before publishing. Almost every field (screener, question guide, media, AI moderator settings, branding, quotas) is still editable once the study is live.

When this matters

Mid-study edits are useful when:

• Your first interviews reveal a question that's confusing or leading.
• You realize you forgot to ask about something important.
• Recruitment is going slower than expected and you need to loosen the screener.

How edits behave

• Edits only affect future participants. Anyone who has already started or finished an interview keeps the version they took. Strella does not move in-flight participants to the new version.
• Version history keeps a record of your edits. Build saves every published version and takes periodic backups as you work, so you can look back at an earlier guide, preview it, and restore it. See Version history.
• Analysis can mix versions without a warning. If you remove a question after 10 interviews and run 10 more, the analysis shows the question with answers from only the first half. Use the participant filter in Analysis to filter by date if you need a clean cohort.

Closing the study

You can't unpublish a live study. To stop recruitment, close it instead:

• Manually, from Settings: Settings → Access & scheduling → Close project to new participants. Existing in-flight participants keep going; new arrivals are blocked.
• Manually, from Share: the Share dialog has the same Close study to new participants toggle, if that's where you already are.
• Manually, from the dashboard: click the study's status on its project-list row and choose Close project (or Reopen project), without opening the study.
• Scheduled: set a close date or a participant limit on the same Settings tab; the study closes automatically when the condition is met.

Closing is reversible: flip the toggle back to reopen, provided your scheduled close date hasn't passed and you're under the participant limit. When a schedule or participant limit is what's holding a study closed, the dashboard's Reopen project option is disabled and names the reason, since reopening there only clears a manual close.

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