Pausing & Triggers

Choice Eliminator runs in the background using Google triggers. This guide explains how to pause the add-on on a form, what the trigger limit means, and how to free up room when you hit it.

Pausing a Form

Every form is either Active or Paused. Pausing stops all enforcement — choice elimination, response limits, and schedule — without deleting your settings. Turn it back on any time and everything resumes exactly as it was.

1. Open your Google Form
2. Open Choice Eliminator from the add-ons menu
3. On the Form tab, open Add-on status at the bottom
4. Toggle Active off to pause
5. Click Save

When the add-on is paused, a banner appears at the top of the sidebar with a Resume button — one click puts it straight back to Active.

Pausing affects the form for everyone who can edit it — it stops the add-on for the whole form, not just for you. Pausing never changes whether the form is currently open or closed; it only stops Choice Eliminator from acting.

The Trigger Limit

Google caps how many triggers Choice Eliminator can run for you, counted across all the forms it runs on. This is a Google limit, not a Choice Eliminator one, and the exact number is not something Google states for add-ons: the Apps Script quotas page documents 20 triggers per user per add-on, while add-ons currently get up to 50 in practice. Rather than ask you to trust either figure, Choice Eliminator shows your real usage and the ceiling it is working against.

Two things to know:

• The limit is per add-on, not per form. Every form Choice Eliminator runs on draws on the same allowance; any other add-on you use has its own separate one.
• A form that uses both a submission-based feature (choice elimination or a response limit) and a schedule uses two triggers (one for submissions, one for the schedule). Those are the only two trigger types Choice Eliminator installs, and Google allows one of each type per user per document, so two is the most any single form can use. You can reach the limit well before you run out of forms.

You can see where you stand under Triggers (for example 18 / 50) in the status modal. When you are at the limit, a red banner reads Choice Eliminator can't run: you're using all 50 triggers, and the form's status shows Needs a trigger instead of running.

Freeing a Trigger

When you're at the limit, free up room by pausing a form you no longer use — pausing releases that form's trigger:

1. Open Add-on status, then open Triggers (or click Manage triggers on the red banner)
2. Under Your other forms, find one you no longer need and click the open-link to go to it
3. On that form, open Choice Eliminator and turn it off (Paused) — that frees its trigger

With a trigger free, reopen the form that needed one — it installs its own trigger and starts running again. Your settings on the paused form are kept — set it back to Active whenever you want it running again.

Pausing affects the form for everyone who can edit it.

Shared & Co-edited Forms

When a form has more than one editor, only one editor's copy of Choice Eliminator actively enforces it at a time. That copy "owns" the form's trigger; the other editors' copies stay dormant, so the form is never counted twice.

If the editor who owns the trigger loses access to the form — for example, they're removed as an editor — another editor's copy automatically takes over the next time they open Choice Eliminator on that form. You don't need to re-save anything.

Pausing applies to everyone. The Active/Paused toggle sets a shared flag on the form, so pausing stops enforcement for all editors instantly — no matter who owns the trigger — and frees your own trigger slot on this form. Resume turns it back on for everyone.

Tips

• Pausing is reversible and keeps everything — prefer it over turning off individual features when you just need a temporary stop.
• If you manage many forms, watch the Triggers count so you're not surprised by the limit mid-term.
• Scheduled forms cost two triggers — keep that in mind when planning how many forms to automate.