Great, thanks for that description. Sounds like it won’t be a problem for us!
This is a bit abstracted, but something like this happens when there is a form post that our service accepts.
- The form data is stored immediately in our database.
These next steps may queue in case of high load, but all will retry and there is rarely a delay of over a minute, though you may cause one with instantaneous load like this (so they may take a few minutes instead; but keep in mind that at this point, your data is already stored and available for API download, and visual confirmation in our UI).
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we submit the form data to akismet where it is checked for spamminess. This isn’t perfect, but it is better than anything short of recaptcha.
- their response indicates how we note it in our UI and our database (we separate those entries deemed spammy and the other step does not happen).
- non-spammy submissions will be notified about, with whatever notifications you configure..
If something were to go wrong, it would depend what broke and how as to what the error would be. Below are the examples I can imagine, but essentially, we aim to keep things up so you will hopefully never experience anything other than the above.
- In case of a total CDN outage probably they couldn’t see the form to submit and submissions could be lost. These events are extremely rare, and almost nonexistant for well configured sites (this weekend’s issue, for instance, was avoided by best practices DNS configuration
- In case of an API latency situation, the submissions would be recorded and the processing (spam check and notification) could be delayed; no customer-facing error would arrive
- In case you totally misconfigure your form, your visitors would receive a 404 error upon posting, but that is up to you to control via your deployments, and test to your satisfaction. In a steady state (no changes to your form), no changes will occur to how submissions are handled as they are driven by what you deploy.
Also, should you have exacting needs like this, you’d be on a higher dollar contract, and we’d be able to make time to teach you the ins and outs of our form handling system to a larger degree than I have time to do in speculation of your future needs here 