Have you ever sent out a form only to receive piles upon piles of nonsense responses from spammers and trolls?
Maybe you sent out a form asking for suggestions and reviews, and now you have way too many responses to sift through with the time you have.
Are you still getting responses on a form that you sent months ago that had a one-week deadline?
“Form Limitations” are meant to help you deal with all of these problems, each of them in a separate way. If you want to make the best use of them, you usually have to do so in some combination or all of them simultaneously.
The Importance of Limiting your Forms
Almost every WordPress form builder plugin allows you to put limits on forms; you’d have a more challenging time finding one that didn’t! This is because limiting your forms is good for two main things:
– More accurate information, and
– Protection from spammers.
Without form limits, any information you collect could end up being inaccurate by some amount.
Spammers could also mess with your information since they’d be able to throw as many spambots as they wanted at your form for as long as they wanted. Although you could also solve this problem with anti-spam tools, there are ways to circumvent even those given enough trial and error.
So now we know why they’re essential, but the question is, when and what kind of forms should you even put limits on?
When Should You be Limiting your Forms?
Form limitations are often necessary to add in certain situations, these include;
- Opening a registration form for a competition
- Sending out a review form for a recent product
- Sending out a form asking users to confirm their attendance for a future event.
- Opening an application form for a job offer
- Sending application forms to pre-order specific products
So on and so forth.
If you chose not to limit the number of responses the form got in any of these cases, you would likely end up with inaccurate data. The exciting part is, the same form limits wouldn’t even work to filter out the false data for every form here!
You may need to add a limit that restricts the number of submissions for a pre-order form, and then need to add a limit per person on the competition entry form! So what kind of limits CAN you add to your forms?
What Kind of Limits Can You Put on Forms?
If you’re using PieForms as your form builder plugin, you’ll notice three different kinds of limits to put on forms. Each of them has its specific uses, and you can even combine them as needed.
Let’s discuss each of them with a few examples.
1. Scheduled Forms:
Adding a time limit or scheduling your form is the most useful of the different types of form limits since it’s not as situational as the other two.
We often use scheduled forms in job applications and general surveys, which you may not want users to open after a specific time.
This limitation makes it easier to sift through the data when all of it comes in since once the time limit for the form expires, users can not submit any more responses.
This limitation is used less as a security measure against spammers and instead to refine results.
2. Limiting Submissions per Device:
Though more specific to the situation, limiting the submissions of your form per device is a handy and necessary feature to have.
This feature is meant to improve both the security and accuracy of the information so that a user can only submit their response once or twice, depending on your choice.
Limiting the number of responses per device has proven effective in stopping scammers from sending wave after wave of bots or trolls and submitting as many responses as they need to muck up your information. It is a must-have feature for almost any form builder.
3. Limiting the Overall Number of Submissions:
Limiting the overall number of submissions can stop you from needing to sift through mountains of data. It’s possibly the most situational out of the three types of form limits, plus you’d likely need to combine it with the other two to get the best outcome, but that doesn’t lessen its impact as a tool.
Let’s say you have a petition that needs to be signed by no more than 50 people or a product review that can start to get diluted after more than 80 reviews.
Without this feature, you’d manually have to track the number of responses and stop users from sending them in. In other words, this feature negates the chances of human error.
Wrapping Up
The limiting tools are all necessary in different ways since they all provide similar but unique services. Without them, form management would be a lot messier and less efficient.
Pie Forms provides you with every tool you need to ensure that you require an external resource to manage your information. Everything you need will be within an arm’s reach.
We hope this helped you with any confusion you may have had about these features, perhaps even giving you some tips on making your work more efficient!
If you are ever confused about anything, look through our documentation, or contact us! Our support team will be with you asap.
Otherwise, good luck with your form-building!