I have a question about captcha errors and form redirects. I have downloaded a copy of my form and posted it on my website in order to keep the styles consistent with the rest of the site (http://psw.scls.lib.wi.us/delivery/devsite/forms/email_TimDrexler.html). I've been testing what happens when the form is filled in incorrectly.
For example, if the required e-mail address field is not filled in properly, upon submission the form highlights the field in red with an error message, but the form is still on my site, i.e. the styles and formatting remain. However, if the captcha on the form is not filled in correctly, the form redirects to the form as hosted on the FormAssembly site and highlights the error. When this happens I lose all the formatting and the surrounding links, images, etc. What I would like to do is keep any forms submitted with errors on my site. Is there something I can change in the HTML or a CSS style I can modify to make this happen? Or do captcha errors fall into a category beyond my immediate control?
Perhaps you received an answer through the support system already. If not, I apologize for the late reply. We had a busy week moving to our new office.
You're correct, the layout of the captcha failure page is beyond your control when you publish the form by copy&pasting HTML code.
We have another publishing method that will keep every possible step of the submission process within your web page. You can learn more about it here: http://app.formassembly.com/pages/support/publishing/#restapi
It requires some more advanced technical skills, so you may need to get the help of your webmaster to set it up.
Thank you for your reply. However, I don't know that the solution you proposed will work in this case, as I am not sure I have access to a server that I can run the scripts on.
I should perhaps approach the statement of this problem from a different angle. As I noted above, leaving a required field empty in the form (such as the e-mail field) produces an error message in the form of a dialog box that pops up telling me a field has not been filled in. Then there is red highlighted text that appears below the e-mail field that says "This field is required". The browser's URL is still that of the original form, i.e. still on my local site, with all the surrounding formats and styles.
In contrast, a captcha error on the form results in a re-direct to a page such as the following: http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/27535/dc9a664aac481f4e959b2a00af54309b/875194/?errors=tfa_captcha_text%3Dfailed_captcha%3B. This is a page hosted on the FormAssembly sites, so I cannot style it, as you said. That would not be a cause for great concern except that I appear to consistently receive captcha errors, despite typing in the correct letters, so that I always get an error every time I test the form in Firefox. On the error page, the message is that the letters were not correctly identified - but the captcha image at this point has changed from what it was on the form itself when I hit the submit button.
This problem appears to mainly be occurring in Firefox (I'm currently using 3.01), and it is consistent . There appears (to me) to be some sort of difference between the captcha image as displayed and the one that FormAssembly is expecting. If that is really the problem, then clearing that up would make the other question of styles for error messages largely irrelevant, or at least not as noticeable.
Just for the sake of argument, I tried submitting the form in IE (6.0.2) and didn't get any captcha errors.
I'd be happy to provide any other information that may be useful.
I can think of two reasons that would make the captcha fail when it shouldn't. The first is that the form is not correctly set up. That is unlikely though since it works for you using IE. The other possibility is that your cookies are disabled in Firefox.
Could you post the link to the form so we can investigate it further? (the link posted above doesn't work anymore)
Whoops, sorry about that. The correct URL is: http://psw.scls.lib.wi.us/delivery/devsite/forms/email_TimDrexler.htm
I honestly don't know what the cookie settings may be in Firefox, so that is definitely a possibility. Let me know if there are any settings you could suggest I tweak to test that.
I also wanted to add that I tried the same form on my home computer (as opposed to my work computer) and had the same problem using Firefox 3. I didn't test it in IE.
Strange, I just tested your form and the captcha was working fine (testing with Firefox 3).
Could you check your cookies settings? Go to the 'Tools' menu in Firefox, then 'Options' and 'Privacy'. In the 'Cookies' section, make sure the 'accept cookies' box is checked, and that there's no exceptions for FormAssembly.com.
I took a look at the cookie settings. The box for "accept cookies" is checked. The box for "accept 3rd-party cookies" is not checked, but I don't know if that is relevant. There were no exceptions listed for FormAssembly (or for anything else).
I also clicked the button to "Show Cookies". There were a number of them listed for FormAssembly. I then tried removing the cookies and re-trying the form, but I still had the same problem.
I did receive the e-mail notifications for the test forms you sent last week, so that worked okay.
Please let me know if you have any other suggestions or if there is anything I can do to assist in troubleshooting.