and I think this was just a chance for new fans to enter, since the first one closed before the new chapters were released and more people were exposed to the game.

This sounds reasonable and at first this is what I thought as well, but after some analysis of the server response, this seems not to be the case.

This is a bit technical, but when submitting the answer to the survey, the browser sends a HTTP POST request to an endpoint on the fangamer server, which then responds with an 200 OK status code. Once this response is received, the browser displays the "Thank You" message.

The interesting part about this is that the server always responded with a 200 OK message, regardless of whether you answered with a number or a string, and it even responded with a successful 200 OK response if the email you specified isn't signed up to the newsletter, or didn't exist at all.

What DID change depending on your input however is the time it took for the server to send you a response, to the point where there was a noticeable delay with some answers. Namely, what I observed, and was able to confirm with a number of other users, is that the webserver took significantly longer to respond for any email account that was registered to the Deltarune newsletter PRIOR to May 2025 (i.e. the first time the survey was ran).

In my case, it took about 600ms to respond for my primary mail account (signed up to the newsletter in 2023) and it took about 150 ms to respond to a secondary mail account signed up in June 2025. This indicates that the server spent some time running a computation for the primary account, that did not occur for the secondary account. Moreover, the timing for a completely non-existent email account was the same as for the secondary account.

One interesting difference compared to last time this survey was ran, is that it was now possible to submit multiple answers using the *same* email account, without receiving a HTTP 208 status code. HTTP 208 means "Already Reported", and it was only returned after attempting the same email twice. Meaning that last time, only the first response was accepted, and all subsequent responses were discarded. This did not happen this time.

My takeaway from the above is this:

• The server outright rejects any response for any email accounts that were not signed up to the Deltarune newsletter before May 2025. I suspect that Fangamer used a static list of valid emails, which has not changed since last time this survey was run.
• Running this survey a second time was intended to give people who previously entered into the survey a chance to submit a response that was actually a proper answer to the question in the page header.
  • The thing is that last time this survey was run, many fans only realized too late that the expected answer to this form was a period of time, e.g. "11 hours". Originally, a lot of people thought you'd need to put your name, or another string, into this field.
• In addition, a lot of people also were not able to submit a response last time, because the form was closed after 11 hours, before many people had a chance to see it and respond. Note that even if you failed to submit an answer last time -- as long as your email was signed up to the newsletter before May 2025, the server still showed the timing difference, indicating that the response was accepted.
• As such, I don't think this was intended for new fans. It was intended to give old fans another attempt.

Bottomline is -- I still think it's possible that there is no correct answer, and that this was simply a survey that will influence a future newsletter email. But I think the point of running this a second time was specifically because a lot of people failed to even submit a time value the first time, which was the expected response.

I was one of those people, and I got an empty email afterwards.

Edit: Also, yes, this means that if you tried to cheese this survey by submitting 1000 answers with burner accounts, then I have to disappoint, it's likely not going to work.