Form submissions are sporadically not being recorded, has anyone else experienced this?

Hm, with the receipts you’d still end up losing the 4-6 paragraph response if the submission didn’t go through

What if you did a two form thing where:

1. First form asks for normal data, including the 4-6 paragraphs
2. On submit, it redirects the users to another form that creates a record that’s linked to the record the first form created.  This second form will handle the file upload only

This way you’d safely get the hard to do stuff because the file upload would be relatively painless to redo?  And of course you’d turn on receipts for both like you mentioned

If you haven’t already, it might also be a good idea to create a confirmation email for your users that fires upon form submission. In the on-screen confirmation, you can say something like, “Thanks for submitting the form! You’ll receive a confirmation email momentarily. If you don’t...” and then explain whether they should resubmit or reach out to confirm their submission went through. That would help flag potential issues right away rather than having to check every single receipt. We do that for all our forms at my org and it’s been a huge help. 

Likewise, you could create an automation that notifies you if a form submission comes through with information missing. I’m assuming that the fields are required on your form. (If not, I’m super pro making as much required as possible, even if it means adding some transition questions and logic to hide or show fields - e.g. “Do you have files to upload? Y/N - if Y - upload to required attachment field; if N, hide field, user can submit form without this.”) 

If they’re required, you could have an automation that checks to see if any fields are empty that should be filled. If they are empty, you can have Airtable send you a notification or tag the record or whatever works for you to notice and address the issue. 

Thank you for your replies, really appreciate the response. I’m now realizing there’s 2 things I missed in my initial post (which I’ll go back and add. EDIT: Nvm, I can’t edit the original?):

• ​@TheTimeSavingCo These 2 forms are both required, but aren’t exclusively mutual; my team can fill out one and then the other later on. For more context, the 1st one is an overall experience survey on an event, the 2nd one is to submit photos, reports, receipts, etc which is filled out a couple of times throughout an event. 
• Our users are primarily filling out these forms using mobile (both Android and iOS). I’ve built these forms directly into the interface, so the users don’t need to leave their Airtable app to fill them out (thus I doubt it’s a browser related issue). 

​@Stephen_Biegner I do already have an automation that notifies our admin team whenever the survey response is received, but it doesn’t run because no record gets created; after each report, I can’t find any record of it existing and I don’t have any automations that delete anything in this table. 

​@Jason Miller234 that’s not a bad idea, I didn’t know they had the ability to check that. I just figured if it didn’t process, that it would be lost.

​@EricGuy  Got it. I think my idea was to have a confirmation email for the person who submits the form. The message on the confirmation screen can let them know if they don’t get a confirmation, then something went wrong, and they should resubmit. (Or, you can have them reach out to you to check.) I’m sure there are times when a weird glitch happens and the form submission doesn’t create a new record. I’m also sure that people are convinced they got to the confirmation screen or hit submit, but actually closed out of the app or form too soon, and that’s part of the issue. 

I’ve had staff come into my office swearing they submitted a receipt via one of our internal forms, and then when they show me, I can see that they never pressed submit and the tab was still open, buried among myriad tabs (no judgement as I have, like 50 tabs currently open - I know, sorry!). 

I know this doesn’t solve the problem of true form submissions not creating records, but could help remove any user error elements. Maybe?

Anyway, sorry if I’m way off base, but I do wonder if setting that up and also checking with Airtable support and asking them to check server logs can help. Good luck! 

Interesting!  And users are reporting issues with both forms?

​@Stephen_Biegner I did actually end up creating a 2nd automation to send them a confirmation as well yesterday, so hopefully that deters the issue. It’s taken me this long to chase it because I usually assume that its user error, but the amount of times I hear it from different people leads me to question that maybe some submissions are actually failing. 

​@TheTimeSavingCo Yes, so I don’t think it’s specific to the form, but the way they’re being processed. It could totally be user error, so now that I’m implementing receipt emails, perhaps it’ll curb the issue. I just wanted to open up the topic to see if anyone else was experiencing something similar.