Forms and contacts

A Form on a published site is not decoration. Somebody fills it in, presses Send, and the message arrives in two places: Contacts, on the project card, and your email.

Building one

1. Insert → Forms → Form, then put Input, Textarea, Select or Checkbox fields inside it and design them like anything else.

2. Name each field. The name is what you read later — a field called name-2 arrives in your inbox as name-2. Give it the label a person would use: Name, Phone, What do you need.

3. Publish. The form’s address is written into the page at publish time, so a form on a draft has nowhere to send to. Publish once and it works from then on.

One site can have several forms

Name them — Contact, Quote request, Careers — and the name arrives with every message, so you can tell which page it came from without guessing.

Where the message goes

Open ⋯ → Contacts on the project card.

Three tabs: Inbox, Unread, and Spam. Each message shows the form it came from, the page it was sent from, and every field the sender filled in. You can mark it read, move it to Spam, or delete it.

The card itself carries a badge — “4 new” — so a message nobody has read is visible on the screen you already open, not buried in a menu.

The message is saved before the email is sent

That order is deliberate. Email is the part that fails: an address that bounces, a spam folder, a mail server that was never set up. The message is written down first, so it survives all three and is on this screen either way.

If you never configure email, Contacts still works. If email works and you delete a message here, it is gone from here only — your inbox keeps its copy.

Who can read them

Editors and owners only. Somebody invited to view a project can see the design and not the messages.

These are real people’s names, phone numbers and email addresses, typed by members of the public who chose to contact that business. Being shown a draft is not consent to read its customer list.

For the same reason the sender’s IP address is recorded for abuse handling and is never shown on screen — a list of leads should not double as a rough list of where people live.

What stops abuse

A form on a published site is open to the whole internet, so it is given a fixed budget rather than trust:

Limit	Value
From one device	5 messages per 10 minutes
To one site	60 messages per hour
Fields per message	40
Size of one message	64 KB

There is also a hidden field no human ever sees. A bot that fills it in gets a cheerful “sent” and the message is dropped — telling a bot it failed only teaches it to try again differently.

A site that is unpublished or taken down stops receiving messages with it, rather than leaving a live funnel behind.

Getting the email

Messages are emailed to your account address as they arrive. If they are not arriving, the cause is almost always mail configuration rather than the form — check Contacts first: if the message is on that screen, the form worked and the email is the part to fix.

Contacts and Orders are different things

Both are what a published site sends back, and they sit next to each other in the same menu, but they are not the same:

• Contacts — somebody asked. A form was filled in.
• Orders — somebody bought. See Selling from your site.

Their badges are coloured differently on the project card so you can tell them apart without reading them.