Submitted form has {Empty} field data in submitted email

I’m new to ChronoForms (and Joomla, for that matter), but I’m trying to help support a client with a particular problem (the original designer is unavailable). Roughly 25% of the time a form is submitted, the form data does not come through in the submitted email – the data is instead represented by the field name surrounded by curly braces. For example, here is the partial contents of an email from a submitted form:

NAME OF PERSON ASSIGNING THE CLAIM {assigning_name}
CONTACT NUMBER {contact_number}
CLAIM NUMBER {claim_number}
Email {email_from}

The other 75% of the time, the form data comes through fine. The site is hosted on GoDaddy, if that makes a difference.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Andy

Hi Andy,

Please see this FAQ

Bob

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately, after checking the FAQ, we still have the same problem. I verified that no form inputs are dynamically disabled, all input names are valid and are correctly referenced in the email template, and we have Captcha serverside validation. When we get these emails, all of the input data is missing, so I was hopeful that it was the serverside validation. But, it looks correctly configured (to me, anyway -- please remember, I'm not overly familiar with Joomla or ChronoForms).

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Andy

Hi Andy,

Please go on and read the Anti-spam FAQ linked from the previous one. I suspect that this may be the result of a bot crawling your site. Checking the IP addresses of the 'spam' emails may help here.

Bob

Hi Bob,

I took a look at the anti-spam FAQ you suggested. It seems like the easiest way to block bots is to implement serverside protection such as Captcha. As far as I know, this is already in place (see screenshot). When I look at the element settings for the Check Captcha event, all it says is that it is Enabled (Yes), and the error message (Incorrect Entry). Is that correct?

Also, I believe this is unrelated, but the client also has some very long delays on some (not all) emails. This delay can vary between 30 minutes to several hours. I read on some other posts that this could be the SMTP settings? Please let me know if I should start a separate thread for this issue.

Thanks!
Andy

Hi Andy,

Captcha is not the same as ServerSide validation; there's a bit of overlap but it does depend on what you are trying to do.

As it happens, your Check Captcha action does nothing at all; you need to add an Event Loop action to the pink On Fail event to re-load the form.

Mail delays have nothing to do with ChronoForms; you'd need to check with your mail service provider. ChronoForms passes them immediately to the Joomla! Mailer which then immediately passes them to the configured site mail server.

Bob

Hi Bob,

I see what you mean now... After I made the suggested changes, it seems to be working properly now. I understand what you're saying now about the blank submissions most likely coming from bots.

Thank you very much for your assistance!

Andy