lalune

Hello, thanks for your reply. Yes, I did disable the Save Draft option. As much as I like this option and its usefulness, with this recent problem, any subsequent users' private and identifying information would be exposed to others using the Save Draft option. This is a new problem and did not happen previously.

There is no caching plugin installed and no server-side caching as far as I know. I have installed a few new plugins, two are inactive, one is active. But all three were installed prior to the last successful and normal draft save which is dated May 24, 2024 @ 1:17 PM (#643).

I've exported the form but would prefer to share it privately as I do not wish to expose the email addresses contained within the form. Is there another option to get this to you?

So there are two problems that are happening recently.

1. Drafts disappearing within days for certain users, but not all.
2. Users accessing their draft link seeing data entered from the previous user. But not consistently.

Problem #1
A user received the draft saved email with the link. When she went to resume from that draft link, she was met with a message telling her it had expired and so she had to start again. It had been less than a week, not 50 days as was configured and as the original email said. She forwarded that draft confirmation email to me (to confirm with me that she was not crazy) and the email looked normal and existed (<u>draft=0c86790c9866</u>). It was dated May 29, 2024 at 8:42?AM and it was on June 3, 2024 at 08:14 that she emailed me about it having expired. I clicked its link and saw a blank form with no info filled in so I included that link in my first post in the forum.

Problem #2
I then did my test submission and saved as draft to see if I would save. That user who just had the expired draft problem emailed me to let me know that when they went to their saved draft link afterwards (at some point after I did my test), they saw MY personal and identifying info in it. When I had done my test, that info was auto filled (normal behavior), I added gibberish in any of the other required fields. I wasn't concerned about my personal info in the form during my test of drafts because I didn't expect that info to be exposed to anyone else. The link they had followed is the draft link in my first post and what was in her email. Before posting it, I had looked at it and it was blank. After she told me about accessing it and seeing MY info in it, I checked that link again, and sure enough, my info was there. I then edited the info in that draft to be fake info (John Smith) and saved it.

What I noticed is when I did MY test, it didn’t end up generating a new draft ID, it was the same ID as that user’s:
Name: John Smith

#683
Draft ID 0c86790c9866
Date Submitted Jun 3, 2024 @ 7:39 PM

But then subsequent saved drafts did generate new Ids and have not yet disappeared.

Name: "Jane Doe"
#684
Draft ID 6l3f884e5da4
Date Submitted Jun 3, 2024 @ 8:00 PM

At 20:03 I edited the John Smith draft=0c86790c9866 submission to change the email address so mine wasn’t exposed and now what was entry #683 is now entry #685 with same draft ID. There is no longer an entry #683 in the list.

#685
Draft ID 0c86790c9866
Date Submitted Jun 3, 2024 @ 8:02 PM

At 20:08 I submitted a new form saving as draft for Santa Claus

#686
Draft ID 1tfeb614886b
Date Submitted Jun 3, 2024 @ 8:08 PM

So, subsequent draft saves did generate new draft Ids. I’ll have to wait more to see if they disappear as users were experiencing.

In my submissions list, this is a range of entry #s before and after the problem:

Her entry for Draft ID of 0c86790c9866 May 29, 2024 at 8:42?AM seems to not be there. I don’t know what happens to entry #s and if the missing ones are significant. I have two other active forms and I’ve made note of those below. I’ve only had two users contact me about disappearing drafts.

#686 Jun 3, 2024 @ 8:08 PM (Santa Claus)
#685 Jun 3, 2024 @ 8:02 PM (John Smith)
#684 Jun 3, 2024 @ 8:00 PM (Jane Doe)
#683 MISSING
#682 Jun 3, 2024 @ 6:56 PM (Artist with problem)
#681 MISSING
#680 MISSING
#679 other form submission
#678 other form submission
#677 other form submission
#676 May 29, 2024 @ 8:49 PM (Artist 676)
#675 May 29, 2024 @ 3:59 PM (Artist 675)
#674 MISSING
#673 MISSING
#672 MISSING
#671 MISSING
#670 MISSING
#669 MISSING
#668 MISSING
#667 other form submission
#666 May 28, 2024 @ 4:41 PM (Me testing)
#665 May 28, 2024 @ 4:39 PM (Me testing)
#664 May 28, 2024 @ 3:13 PM (Me testing)
#663 MISSING
#662 May 28, 2024 @ 12:59 PM (Artist 662)

Thanks...

Ignore that draft link. While it was empty at one point (and why I felt it was fine to post), when the next actual user came along and saved their draft and then visited their link, it was another user’s actual information in their form. So as not to expose info, I have now edited that draft with nonsense).

I found it! I had to go into “Edit field”, then the “Repeater” tab to disable the “Field Repeater” option which will “Allow fields in this group to be repeated.”

• This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by lalune.

Perfect, thank you! This will help my submitters a lot. I had seen that but was a bit afraid to try, not knowing how much of that line I needed and didn’t want to break anything or cause problems. Learning bit by bit!

That is fantastic, thanks. I didn’t see that filter option. Seeing the drafts helped answer where missing groups of forms IDs went to, but those unknown images are still a mystery as they weren’t part of any of the drafts.

Wow. Thank you so much! I am truly blown away by how perfect your form plugin is. I’ve designed quite a complex form, with some conditions, and it has met every expectation and need I had. I had actually just highly recommended it on a blog post today at Elegant Themes when I didn’t see it in the list! Thanks for putting out such great work.

Ok, thanks for that information, it’s important to know. That is a problem because if I use SMTP and try to send 2500 emails at once, I will get in trouble with my hosting provider and could lose my accounts for all the domains I host. I was hoping that Email Subscribers would regulate the sending of those emails (or the sending of that info to SMTP service) so that it wasn’t such a large amount going out at once which will make my provider notice and could also put me in violation of their terms because of resource hogging. Thanks.

Thank you. My question is, if I use SMTP, are the emails throttled or do they get sent out all at once? I saw mention of it being regulated if using cron, but no mention of this if using SMTP. I don’t want to throw up red flags and get in trouble for dumping out 1500 emails instantly.

The problem is, I don’t want to schedule them. I want to send out immediately, but not in one fell swoop. I need to make sure it’s being throttled or we’ll have a problem with the provider. I don’t use Cpanel or Plesk and cannot without it overwriting all my old crontab entries (since that’s how I had always used cron), I log in with a shell and edit crontab on the command line. I’ve edited crontab to send within a few minutes of “now” and it’s not triggering for some reason. That is my new problem.

To clarify what I want, I want to send out the 1200 emails, starting the job “now”, but in increments of 50, about 5 min apart until that email has been sent to all 1200 people, then that’s it, it stops. I have tried setting crontab to trigger the URL a few minutes from “now” by changing the run times, but nothing happens. My queued message sits and my test group receives nothing (my actual domain is in the trigger URL).

10 16 * * * https://www.mysite.com/?es=cron&guid=redftz-bvizsn-hdvbre-nmgphj-mspwjo

@cockpitseeker: in a shell on the server, I made a “symbolic link”, like a shortcut, to “Global” so that both “Global” and “Shop” exist and point to the same thing.

Seems to have solved this problem for me.

I did a symbolic link of global to shop and it looks like it’s fine. No errors showing up so far.

Ahh ok, thanks. FYI, I turned off all plugins except for Social Ring and the problem still exists, so at least that narrows it down a bit.

For now it is here:
https://www.makingitwithmarilyn.com/wordpress/
Still configuring and setting up.

It’s strange, at one point they did all show up but I haven’t been able to figure out why they were there for a bit, and why they are not now. It isn’t a matter of being logged in or not. I haven’t changed any plugins when one minute they are there and the next they are gone. I was editing some text, saved it, viewed newly edited page and there they were, all buttons showing. I navigate to another post, only the Facebook share button is showing, navigate back to that post that showed them and now they are gone. So weird.

Thanks for your help. It was already in there (I’m using Elegant Theme’s Gleam theme). I wonder what else it could be.