Publish a form and share its link

A form stays a private draft until you publish it. Publishing gives it a public address that you can send to anyone. Your client opens it, answers, and gets the PDF.

Publishing for the first time

1. Go to Forms and click Edit on the form.
2. Open the Preview tab to try it. This is the real form, but answers typed here are never saved or sent.
3. Click Publish at the top right. Fillfold refuses if the form has no question, or if a question has no title, and says why.
4. The status changes from Draft to Published, and an Open form button appears so you can see it as your client will.
5. Open the Settings tab. Under Public address you see the link, ending in /f/ and the form's address. Click the copy icon next to it (Copy link).
6. Paste the link in an email, a text message or anywhere your clients will see it.

You can change the address in the same box (lowercase letters, digits and single hyphens, 3 to 60 characters). Once the form is published, changing it breaks the links you already shared.

Publishing later changes

While a form is published, your edits are saved as a draft and visitors keep seeing the published version. The status then reads Published · unpublished changes. Click Publish changes when you are ready. This covers the questions, the design, the languages, the PDF document, the Message after submitting and Generate a document for each response.

Unpublish takes the form offline. Your responses stay in your account.

Settings that control answers

In the Settings tab, the box When the form accepts answers holds limits that apply straight away, without publishing again:

• Stop after this many answers: leave empty for no limit.
• Opens on (optional) and Closes on (optional): a date and time, in your own time zone. The form must open before it closes.
• Only one answer per email address: available once the form has an Email question. Answers received before you turned it on are not checked.

The same tab also has Generate a document for each response. Turn it off to collect answers without producing a PDF. Unlike the limits above, this choice reaches visitors when you publish.

Email alerts and your privacy notice

Two more options in the Settings tab apply straight away, without publishing again:

• Email me when new responses arrive: ticked by default. The email never contains the answers. See Responses: PDF and CSV.
• Your privacy notice: the https:// address of your own privacy page. A link to it then appears under the form, next to a link to Fillfold's page. You collect your clients' answers, so it is up to you to tell them how you use their data.

Good to know

• If you publish changes while a client is filling in the form, their sending is refused and they are asked to reload the page. Publish at a quiet moment if you can.
• Before it opens, after it closes, or once it is full, visitors see a short notice instead of the form. The notice is in the visitor's language, and an opening time is shown in UTC (universal time).
• A link can fill in some answers for your client: add ?key=value to the address, where the key is the one shown in the question settings.
• To show the form inside your own website, see Embed on your website. To see what your client gets, see What your client sees.