I have a contact form that appears in the footer of every page of my site. It works incredibly well, and I would never have guessed that we would consistently get so many enquiries via it.
However, one problem that keeps happening, is that a client will complete the form, and we will receive an email as expected. But then over the subsequent several hours/ day, we will receive further repeat emails with exactly the same details/ text in it - almost as though the submit button had been pressed again on the same form.
I’m wondering whether this is because the person may have revisited a tab, and this is reinterpreted as another submission.
How can I prevent this? I’m really keen to keep the contact form in the footer.
Thanks
think you’ve linked something wrong, can’t access it - but generally this happens when your form doesn’t redirect to a separate “thank you” page and you just redirect the person to the same page they were. Is yours doing this?
OK, so the form does direct to a thank you page, but there is a contact form at the base of the thank you page as it is in the footer!
could this be the reason? when I tested it just now the contact form on the thank you page was empty, and none of the entered text was carried across
Clearly I linked incorrectly; my site is here
We get that as well on sparkleapp.com, I don’t have a better explanation, I also think it must be page in the history somehow. There is a workaround in place to try to prevent duplicate submissions but for some reason it’s not working correctly, and I’m not sure that it can in fact be fixed at all.
Oh well. At least it’s not just my site!
Is there any way to put in place a simple verification that has to be completed before a form can be submitted (eg a colleague has a check that simply asks you to type in any two digit number before submitting), and would that likely stop this from happening?
It would not stop it from happening, only annoy normal site visitors. That’s an anti spam measure, but spam bots are sophisticated enough to solve math or simple questions.
Ok, many thanks Duncan.
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Thank you Woodrow! I really appreciate the feedback!
I’m confused. Is it that contact forms built into footers present this problem of duplicate submissions, or is it that all forms built in Sparkle present this problem?
You can have multiple contact forms pointing to the same thank you page, and they should only send a single email. That’s designed to work, if it sends multiple emails it’s a bug we need to fix.
The problem discussed here is when someone leaves a tab open or navigates history, ending up on the form submission page. In that case occasionally an identical form is sent. Sparkle already attempts to work around this by storing a cookie with a hash of the form content, to avoid a duplicate submission, but clearly in some cases this is ineffective.