Public form links
Sharing a form with people outside your organisation, and protecting it with an access code.
A form does not have to be filled in by your own staff. Every form has a public web address that anybody can open in a browser, with no CommonLynk account and nothing to install.
The public link
The address has this shape, where the token is a long random identifier belonging to that one form: /forms/f/<token>/
The link works only while two things are true: the form is marked public, and its status is not Closed. If either stops being true the address still resolves, but the visitor is shown a closed message rather than the questions. So a link you have already sent out can be switched off without leaving a broken address behind it.
There is a second kind of link as well. From the form's Lynks screen you can generate them in bulk, one for each person, so everybody receives an address of their own rather than sharing one. Those links have this shape: /forms/respond/<token>/
Protecting a form with an access code
A public form can be given an access code. The visitor then meets a short gate asking for the code before any question is shown, and entering the right one opens the form for that browser session, which lasts an hour.
The code is stored hashed rather than in plain text, which means nobody can read it back out of the platform afterwards, your own administrators included. Keep a copy of it wherever you keep the rest of your project paperwork, because if it is lost the only remedy is to set a new one.
Stopping the same person answering twice
Each form carries a duplicate policy with three settings: allow, warn or block.
What the policy can actually check depends on who is filling the form in. An anonymous visitor on a public link has no identity beyond their browser session, so the browser session is what gets compared. On a form set to block, a browser that has already submitted is shown an already submitted page and the second attempt is refused.
When a member of staff fills the same form in inside the workspace the check is a firmer one, because the response is attached to a named individual. There the platform looks for an earlier completed response from that same person.
After the visitor submits
A public submission ends on a thank you page, at the form's own address with thanks on the end: /forms/f/<token>/thanks/
What a link cannot do
Two things people reasonably expect, which the platform does not offer:
- A link has no expiry date. It cannot be set to stop working on a given day.
- There is no maximum number of responses. A link cannot be set to accept the first fifty answers and then close itself.