Email field erased on first submit- accepted on second submit

Hey @webmasterpro!

That’s odd. Is both WordPress and HappyForms up to date? Would you mind including your page URL? We’d love to have a closer look into this.

Thanks! ??

I knew you’d be up for some fun! OK take a look at the following URL:
https://christiansciencect.org/contact-us-webmaster3/

You can actually try filling out the form and sending because I’ll get the messages myself.

WP and HappyForms are both current

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by webmasterpro.

Thanks, @webmasterpro!

That’s super odd. We built the same form on our end and couldn’t replicate the issue. A couple of questions…

1. How is the form added to your page? Did you use Add HappyForms button in the editor? Or did you manually insert the shortcode to your page, or even used shortcode directly in page template code?
2. Just to rule out everything — would you mind building an identical form again using HappyForms → Add New screen and see if the issue applies to new forms too?

Let us know how you go! ??

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by thethemefoundry.

Yes, very odd. I built an identical form using Add New, and the same issue applies.

If I uninstall Happyforms and reinstall, same issue.

Here is more oddness:

1) If I change the email field to OPTIONAL, then the form is successfully submitted when the Submit button is clicked.

2) BUT, in the received email, the email field is absent. The label is present, but the email address that was typed in is not there.

Is there any code that checks the email address for validity that may not be working well? Just wondering.

Addendum- there seems to be two ways fields are validated.

First, if you leave out a required entry, when you click Submit a black box appears under the any field saying “Please fill out this field”.

Second, with the email field something different happens- a red text message appears under the email input box saying “This field is required.” This happens if the email filled out and NOT empty.

Thus, there are two mechanisms at work to detect missing/bad entries. Is there a problem there?

We agree the nature of this issue is very tricky. Even more so considering that we’re not able to replicate this on our end.

Would you mind switching theme to some default one for a brief moment and see if it helps? Sorry for back and forth, we’re just trying to rule out any possible third-party conflicts.

You’re right there are two layers for validation. The first is a browser validation which just checks if the string has formatting of email address (that’s Please fill out this field you can see). Then there’s a backend validation which happens on submit and has various additional checks so we’re sure the submitted value is email address (that’s displayed in red below field after submit if anything goes wrong).

Let us know how it goes! We’ll be happy to investigate this further.

It was indeed the theme. The site uses the Sterling WordPress theme by TrueThemes on ThemeForest.com. Changing it temporarily to Twenty(something) allowed HappyForms to work properly, (and messed up my widgets until I restored the wp_options table!).

You had a good suggestion. I’ll need to do some digging as to why the theme was the culprit. It has an email form builder which is turned OFF, but evidently some code is still causing a conflict.

I’ll take a whack at it. Meantime, many thanks for your time and assistance looking into this weird problem. Cheers!

Oh, great job investigating this, @webmasterpro! We’re glad to hear it helped shed some light on the issue. Let us know your findings!

Have a wonderful weekend! ??