html form help!

Smiley012

Hi there,

I'm hoping someone can help me, but I'm trying to create a form in my website, that people can input information in, then when they click submit, it is emailed to me. (or maybe saved to another page elsewhere that only I can view?)

It's for a psychology experiment, so for obvious ethical reasons all answers have to be completely anonymous, I don't want their email addresses or anything.

<FORM method="post" action="mailto:eilyis@gmail.com?subject=form1answers" ENCTYPE="text/plain">
<INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="TXTBOX1" SIZE="40">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" value="Submit">
</FORM>

I got the above code from looking at various websites, but this pops up with the participants email program opening up, but thats not what I want, I just want the information that is put into this form!

Please, I really could do with someones advice on this!!

Thanks in advance!

Smiley

dr.bollocko

That mailto: action is not what you want, as it references a command to open your email app.
You want a little bit of ASP or ADO. You can go about writing it to a database, but I dont think your project is on that scale, all you want is a generated email that the submit button emails directly. Are you familiar with any kind of web-based programming other than HTML? There are a load of ways to do what you want but it depends on what you are familiar with.

Smiley012

Ok, thanks for the information, I'm a bit of a novice at this, do you think you could paste any links to where I can find the code for that? Or any information on it?

See, I just want this information that people write into the text box to go somewhere where only I can read it, if it goes into my email address... then thats perfect, but if it goes to another page that only I can read, then thats also cool!

Is that what that ASP can do for me?

I don't think it is on the scale, infact it's only 120 participants maximum, I read up something about CGI script, but eircom (which is where I was going to upload the site on to) don't take CGI scripts at all, so I know it's not out of the question as a few other places do, but I wanted to look around to see if there were any other options.

Thanks again for your quick reply

Sorry I forgot to add in, I'm not really that familiar with a lot of other code, VB, HTML, tiny bit of java, but I'm a quick learner and tend to pick things up very quickly when it comes to code!

dr.bollocko

Well VB will get you into ASP fine. I have found a few tutorials, but if its something you have time to do, I would really read a couple of intro tutorials before copying and pasting any ole code into your page.
http://www.bellaonline.com/subjects/3071.asp

here is w3schools take on it.
What you want to do is take in the inputted values on the form into variables, and then use these variables to generate the email content that you need. the "submit" buttons action should trigger the mail sending, so there are a fw aspects that might trip you up.

If you want to have a look at ADO to come up with a simple database to write to you could do this, but for a small amount of users, if that many emails is manageable and searchable for results, that should be fine....

Smiley012

Excellent I'll look these up.

When I press the submit button, I won't have trouble with the participants email application opening up or anything like that with these will I?

This has been excellent thanks a million, I've been looking on forums, and posting on forums all day and this has been the quickest and best response I've had! So thanks very much!

dr.bollocko

Nah this circumvents an Outlook box jumping up by using the mail server to send the mails directly. You can generate the "from" field to something unique so you can separate these results out from your generic email. You can even specify the "to" field. In fact, by deleting most of the code and putting it in a loop, its a pretty good mailbomb if you wanna piss off a lecturer too.

Smiley012

brilliant! ha! I'll keep that tip in mind, I'm just researching and looking up about it now, think it'll work a treat.

So no information about the participant themselves is sent to me - - only the information that they have put in the text box, I just need to clarify this, cos as u can imagine, I'd get in big trouble if it turned out I could identify people lol.

thanks again!

dr.bollocko

It's blind to the user, you are totally relying on whatever info is on the form. The ASP code generates the email and sends it, this cannot be seen by the user. He just sees a form with a submit button. The user cant edit the email at all, they dont even know it exists as it works below the GUI. It isnt sent using their email account, it isnt sent using their email server. Its sent using your webserver to your email account.

Smiley012

Brilliant, thanks again, you've been an absolute star!xxxxxxxxxxxxxx