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Forums: Questions and Answers About Building Your Site
Created on: 04/13/09 02:21 PM Views: 1857 Replies: 7
Monday, April 13, 2009 at 2:21 PM

I have created a form and posted on my site (Verify Ownership)for members to complete. It is a form with the "mailto..." I tested it and it works beautifully with IE7/Outlook Express. I had someone else test it when logged in through AOL and I just receive a blank e-mail. ConfusedDoes anyone have experience with this or know how to fix it? Thanks.

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Monday, April 13, 2009 at 4:58 PM - Response #1

Wow that's pretty amazing -- you're the only person to my knowledge who's ever created their own manual custom fill-out form on Class Creator. Good for you!

I'm actually not sure what type of issues you're going to have with this. You're using an incredibly simplistic mailto submit action, and I'm not sure that's going to work in all browsers. Clearly there seems to be some trouble with the AOL browser, and I don't know who else may be affected (I don't think some older browsers will support this).

Let me ask you this: Why not create this same information with your Survey Maker? It may look a little different than your setup here, but isn't collecting the information what's important? It seems to me you could ask this exact same stuff with the survey maker and simply set your results to non public. This way, you'd actually have a record of all submissions too, all in one place, without simply having the results dumped in an email to you.

Curious, if there's any reason the Survey Maker can NOT meet your needs here, let me know what is is. Although the Survey Maker was intended for surveys, it's really just a form creator, and you should be able to use it to generate any type of form you want, and collect any data you want. Not to mention you won't run into browser issues, etc. with the Submit function.


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Edited 04/13/09 4:59 PM
Monday, April 13, 2009 at 5:24 PM - Response #2

Hey Brad,
I have a similar situation. My form I made is located here: http://www.ellicottmills.org/class_custom3.cfm

I also made a survey - at the end it says "Submit Survey" and there isn't a way to change that. Otherwise, it would work perfectly as any kind of form for any purpose.

~Beth

Update: also it would be nice if we could set a different email address to send it to, not just all the admins. In my case, these architectural applications should go to "architectural@ellicottmills.org" rather than "webmaster@ellicottmills.org"

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Edited 04/13/09 5:29 PM
Monday, April 13, 2009 at 5:35 PM - Response #3

OK now....don't laugh at my convoluted scheme. Here it is.

I'm trying to do a "double opt-in" type of sign up to prevent people from signing up as other people or with other people's e-mail. Sooo...

First of all, I made it so that they have to be verified by me before getting full access to password protected areas.

Next, on my welcome e-mail, I put a link to my Verify Ownership form (not password protected). When I get their form e-mail, I do a compare against another database of names and ownership that I have.

When they match, I verify them at the site and send an e-mail telling them they are now good to go.

Main reason the survey doesn't work is that I'm asking them to do this step before they are verified.

As I said, it worked beautifully with IE7 and Outlook Expreess. But since I know I'll have a lot of AOLers, I need to resolve this or switch to a different but similar way to do my "double opt-in".

Make sense (coming from a novice)?Rolling Eyes

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Edited 04/13/09 5:47 PM
Monday, April 13, 2009 at 6:13 PM - Response #4

Beth Shaw wrote:

Hey Brad,
I have a similar situation. My form I made is located here: http://www.ellicottmills.org/class_custom3.cfm

I also made a survey - at the end it says "Submit Survey" and there isn't a way to change that. Otherwise, it would work perfectly as any kind of form for any purpose.

~Beth

Update: also it would be nice if we could set a different email address to send it to, not just all the admins. In my case, these architectural applications should go to "architectural@ellicottmills.org" rather than "webmaster@ellicottmills.org"

Simple solution there is to just change "Submit Survey" to just say "Submit" instead. Now you can more easily use the Survey Maker to create any type of form.

Regarding who receives what, we'll have to hit this along with the Admin Rights module. Good suggestion.


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Monday, April 13, 2009 at 6:21 PM - Response #5

SITE ADMINISTRATOR wrote:

OK now....don't laugh at my convoluted scheme. Here it is.

I'm trying to do a "double opt-in" type of sign up to prevent people from signing up as other people or with other people's e-mail. Sooo...

First of all, I made it so that they have to be verified by me before getting full access to password protected areas.

Next, on my welcome e-mail, I put a link to my Verify Ownership form (not password protected). When I get their form e-mail, I do a compare against another database of names and ownership that I have.

When they match, I verify them at the site and send an e-mail telling them they are now good to go.

Main reason the survey doesn't work is that I'm asking them to do this step before they are verified.

As I said, it worked beautifully with IE7 and Outlook Expreess. But since I know I'll have a lot of AOLers, I need to resolve this or switch to a different but similar way to do my "double opt-in".

Make sense (coming from a novice)?Rolling Eyes

Makes perfect sense. So you do in fact need your custom made form to submit. I think this method here will work. Although I can't guarantee it will work in every browser, particularly in older browsers or some web enabled portable devices.

You might want to put instructions at the top of your page advising your owners to only complete this form using Interent Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome.


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Thursday, July 11, 2013 at 11:57 PM - Response #6

I want to be able to tell people with questions about what they see on the homepage to write to me. I am more interested in a one on one exchange than with creating a "library" of answers. Is there anything more required than making my name a mailto link?

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Wednesday, July 17, 2013 at 2:01 PM - Response #7

Unless you are placing your email address in an announcement that is displayed only to logged in members, I would not display a link to your email address openly on your site. This will open you up to receiving lots of spam mail. Personally, I would direct people to the Contact Us page to fill our the form to submit any questions. These contact notifications will be delivered to your email address.


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