File Upload Field Setting Not Working As Expected

Hi,

I manage a website that is a job board for various nonprofits. Our website was built by a third-party developer before I started with the organization. The website uses the Formidable Forms plugin, as well as the Formidable Forms Pro, Formidable Bootstrap, and Formidable Bootstrap Modal extensions. Unfortunately, I can’t login to your Formidable Forms Pro website to submit a ticket, because I have no clue who purchased the plugin. Most likely, it was purchased by the developer who built our site.

At any rate, we ran across a pretty significant issue. Our website uses your plugin to capture job applications that are submitted. For the past two years, our admin has been logging into the WordPress dashboard, navigating in the dashboard to “Forms” => “Entries”, then filtering to see only the entries from the application form. She then downloads a .csv file of those application form entrees, saves this downloaded file to a folder, and deletes the entries from the WordPress database.

The entire time that our admin has been going through the above process, we were under the impression that these entries and any associated files were being deleted. We assumed this because we checked the setting on the upload field that says, “permanently delete old files when replaced or when the entry is deleted.” Because we delete the entries every month, we assumed that the files associated with those entries were also being deleted.

This week, we discovered that the files associated with those entries were not being deleted. The thing is, our application form lets applicants upload their cover letters and resumes. While most of the form info is stored by your plugin in the WordPress database, and is later deleted by our admin, your plugin stores the uploaded resumes and cover letters in the “uploads” folder of our website files. This means that anyone who knows the file path and file name can access these files, and someone with a sophisticated enough knowledge of servers can locate them through other methods. This week, we learned that we actually had two years of old resumes and cover letters in our uploads folder. We’ve since deleted them, but that doesn’t stop new files from hitting that folder with every upload.

So, my question is twofold:

1) Our assumption was that when you go to the settings for the upload field and check the setting that says, “permanently delete old files when replaced or when the entry is deleted,” that any files associated with a particular entry – including those pdf and image files that get uploaded to the “uploads” folder – will be deleted. Is this not the case? If not, what do you mean by, “permanently delete old files when replaced or when the entry is deleted?”

2) Assuming we’re correct that these files should be deleted when we delete the associated entry, do you have any plans to fix this issue?