has anyone seen webform create duplicate, or even triplicate submissions?
i know sometimes users get impatient and will click more than once, also that fingers can just slip, but it seems we're seeing a lot more of this just recently related to some adjustments we made
seems like i've received dupes off drupal mailing lists myself before and am curious if there are obvious places to look to try to track this down
our general experience has been, we saw NO duplicate submissions for six months or so, but now after these adjustments, we're seeing it happen four and five times a week or more
to be specific, these are customer-facing forms; when a customer fills one out and submits, we receive an e-mail; in the cases of the dupes, they're identical down to time in most cases ... in a few, there's a gap of a minute or so between two identical submissions
SECOND QUESTION: assuming you were convinced this WAS slipping fingers or impatience, is there a commonly accepted way to prevent someone from clicking submit more than once in one attempted use of a form (without outright preventing them from submitting again at a later date)?
Comments
another detail on this ...
i've had a report now that a user who submitted the form received a 404 rather than his confirmation page; obviously that could explain a re-submission
but i've tested the submission process myself several times and received the expected confirmation page; so my question is somewhat the same: anyone familiar with reasons Webform might be erratic in redirecting to a form-submission confirmation page?
Are you using shared hosting?
I had problems with Dreamhost (and found several others who did, too) where form submissions would result in server errors pretty regularly. It seemed that the server was low on resources and just crapped out on me instead of giving a meaningful error. Switching to a VPS server fixed it for me.
we're on vps so ok on that front
hopefully; but your mention of "meaningful" error is helpful
as best as i can tell, submissions are coming through ok; there seems to be something going on with how people get redirected to their confirmation page after (but it seems intermittent); apparently people's submissions are succeeding but they're receiving confusing or no feedback in some cases and re-submitting
i've identified from the form logs the times when it's happened (and correlated with file not found errors in recent log entries) and passed along to my development guy, in hopes that will point him in the right direction
Now I wonder,
Do you know where you could check on drupal.org if others have the same problem? I'm curious :)
actually, no
not in a targeted way
the best i've ever managed was to do a general search and plow through what i found, whether it be issue queue stuff too technical for me, group postings often too general but sometimes too technical also, or bits and pieces of different how-to(s)
sometimes it would start to stick together and i'd have an insight, or know a little better where to look for one, or how to try to test something
but overall, i'd have to say no, i don't know where i'd have a reasonable likelihood of learning, getting help, or offering some, except this group
Our problem in a nutshell…
Thank you. This is exactly what we (drupal.org, project maintainers, documentation writers/organisers) need to get better at.
consider me a willing test
consider me a willing test subject, as needed =:)
just having this particular group started has been a great help to me already; i'm surprised more people haven't turned up -- probably don't know it's here
please give me a push in the right direction if i make myself a nuisance
Since you asked...
I'll answer, too, Roy. I usually Google my questions, be they Drupal or any other kind. Hopefully the results include a similar question/answer somewhere on drupal.org or a subdomain. Or I recognize a post of a Drupal developer that I recognize, someone whose reputation I trust.
I've never used a forum on drupal.org and very rarely, though it's increasing, have I read discussions on issue queues. I do subscribe to the Support list and the Consultants list. I mostly lurk and rarely participate, though that's changing too.
I haven't wanted to disturb developers with non-coding questions. Or to get rudely treated, which does sometimes happen. I've mostly joined Groups, since they seem to be places that tolerate questions. That's one reason I finally created this group, which by the way now has 82 members, pretty good for just a few weeks of existence.
I read Planet Drupal quasi-religiously, and bookmark interesting articles that seem like they might help.
I do see this space as one for questions/answers when they aren't ones better asked/answered elsewhere. I think we're beginning to see where/how to determine which fit, which don't.
Joe, please keep asking your questions, until and unless we figure out a better way.
Best, Marilyn
good points, marilyn; i've
good points, marilyn; i've felt all those things a bit at times
the idea of groups based on function seems helpful; i wouldn't hesitate to read through or ask a question in an issue queue, or comment, if i thought it was to the point; i also might create an issue; but it would be preferable to be able to frame the question in the context of other site administrators ("has this happened to you? what would you do?") before going that route ... since it might not even be appropriate
even in this group, the drupal experience and expertise range seems quite large, but because of the similarity by function (site adminstrator, content editor) i know people understand what i'm driving at, even if i'm not speaking drupal fluently and don't know the history and the key issues
the thing that is inhibiting/intimidating about drupal.org at large for me is the sense of not knowing how to approach a discussion, or when is the right time, based on the context (there's so much information, it's hard to know how to direct my attention)
one issue here may be the one of content administrators who have paid support contracts; i want to know drupal better to be a better administrator and eventually to solve more of my own development problems (and am eager to pass along any useful info i have to others) -- at the same time, my primary job is content for my business and i'm closely attached to one particular developer and support firm for site work; this gives me a particular perspective that doesn't always match up well with people who are primarily programmers or interface people and this itself can inhibit useful communication in some cases i would think
if there were more publicized low-impact instances of "we need 20 people to give us an hour a week on chore X" that might really lower the fear factor for lurkers such as myself; the thing that i imagine some people find very intimidating is that what at first glance looks a little like a casual conversation suddenly comes into focus as a couple of dozen highly experienced people with some shared history and purpose not commonly known; it takes a while for people who aren't part of the community to recognize the vast investments of time so many of you have made, to begin to figure out where we might fit in
some of the commentary i've seen encouraging new people to get involved (positive and to the point) suffers by this; there's definitely a kind of expert-level blindness at play -- a projection of the expert-level perspective onto a wide range of newcomers, some who are expert but new to drupal, some who are intermediate AND new to drupal, some who are totally newcomers and may be largely non-technical besides; what's needed is a way to sort those people as soon as they come around on drupal.org; otherwise they'll just go "this place is scary" and leave and maybe not come back
I've occasionally had
I've occasionally had duplicates from people hitting the back button and thinking they haven't submitted, or trying to "revise" their submission. Those won't have the same time though. For the same time I would definitely think it is a double click. Is there anything else involved? Do you have a load balancer or any other networking equipment in between. I could see a piece of equipment occasionally having a bug and re-posting a request.
thank-you page missing in action
no networking equipment in between but something glitchy is happening
i've been able to correlate duplicate submissions with the thank-you page following the form returning "File Not Found" errors, but when i test this myself, i get redirected to the thank-you page as expected
any thoughts on how this could happen intermittently? i would have thought this was pretty black and white; if there's something broken the thank-you should never come up properly after a submission, right?
it seems like some (or all) people are not getting their confirmation that their submission succeeded, and some of them are backing up and resubmitting
"returning "File Not Found"
"returning "File Not Found" errors, but when i test this myself, i get redirected to the thank-you page as expected" - Check the url you are forwarding to. It may be that there is something funny about it that works for you but might not for other browsers or computers. I'm not saying this is the case for you, but an interesting example of something that just happened to me today. I was getting reports of people getting 404s for links to some forms. Everything worked fine for me and almost everyone else. I wanted to chalk it up as user error, but then I found a machine that didn't work and realized the relative urls that were put in were incorrect. They were missing an opening slash. Older versions of browsers (in this case FF2) would handle it strictly, but newer versions compensate. It is a case of the newer browsers being more "user-friendly" and compensating for bad code.
that seems in the ballpark,
that seems in the ballpark, thanks; we seem to be losing some session data that's dynamically constructing the redirection URLs for the confirmation pages -- but, perversely, as you say, sometimes it's being compensated for, sometimes not; the session data seems not as persistent in some case as others; something about session variables for statically cached pages? developer says clearing boost cache had at least a temporary corrective effect
it's looking now like session
it's looking now like session variables may be periodically getting wiped by boost cache activity; the consequence is that some of the info needed to construct the confirmation page URL is getting lost; so the problem may not be intermittent and related to browser, but periodic and related to when in the boost cache cycle a form gets submitted; it seems like the dupes would be more periodic if this is in fact what's happening, but possibly the problem only occurs in a certain part of the cycle IF someone is submitting then; a ways to go yet before it's resolved
see something like a
see something like a resolution here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/150834