CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi there,

  I have set up a feedback form that works only occasionally.  By that I mean, when I test it out, email gets sent to the designated account with the appropriate data.  But later, I found out (by talking to them) that several visitors had submitted the form but the email was not being sent so I lost lots of valuable feedback.  What I'm wondering is whether or not there is any way to recover the data that was entered into the form - be it from sendmail log files, or mysql dumps, or anything?  I am not the administrator of the site so access is quite limited but if anyone can help me locate the lost information, I could work with the admin to help me retrieve it.

  advTHANKSance,

Tim

Hello,

you trust your visitors very much. I know several people who think they have submitted something but they don't read "Continue/Cancel" dialog boxes. Or they say "the Internet is down" when their Outlook is bugging.

But there may be legitimate concerns. So... why not try to use FormBuilder instead ? it records everything in the database and you can download feedback structured in CSV format. Easy, no email to handle.

Pierre M.

Thanks for the tip, and yes, I will use form builder in the future.  However, is there any way that I can recover what may be lost?  There must be log files somewhere that folks use to debug things?

Often webserver logs log GET requests and only the header of POST requests used to post forms.
See your webserver logs. May be your feedbackform has used GET and the data is there. But if it has used POST (it should) the lost data is ...lost.
Or you may be very lucky and your hosting provider has setup mod_security which logs everything in POST requests too.

Pierre M.

only if its set to log them