Thank you page hit, but no form sent?

could this be bots crawling the form?

[PaulHudson]

Hi, I have a customer with an existing site, he is concerned that he is not receiving all the emails he should be.

He counts them by the amount of times the thank you page is hit, not a bad idea I thought.

Typical example is, 11 hits on thankyou.htm 3 forms received.

I have checked:

1, java form, is correct and well supported by the server; in fact it is a service offered by the server though a wizard.

2, the only way to view the thankyou.htm is by filling out he form.

3, his email system defiantly works, I even tried receiving his emails just to double check.

The only reason I can think of is robots crawling the page and being counted as hits.

Your thoughts are appreciated; I’m loosing it over this one! ;-)

[jdMorgan]

It could be robots, but you should see them logged on the form page as well, if
"2, the only way to view the thankyou.htm is by filling out he form" is true.

On the other hand, if there is any useful information on the "Thank you" page, such as a phone number to contact in case of problems, then someone may be using their browser's "history" button to return to it to note the number... just a guess.

If you are looking at raw logs on a dedicated server, then the numbers will probably be accurate. If you are looking at "stats" then almost none of the current packages are 100% accurate. Raw logs on shared servers are often incomplete (records are often dropped due to temporary overloads) and so neither raw logs nor "stats" on shared servers are 100% accurate.

Make sure good 'bots are Disallowed from the form and the ThankYou page using robots.txt, and back that up with more absolute access control (e.g mod_rewrite on Apache, ISAPI Rewrite on IIS) for bad 'bots as well.

Jim

[PaulHudson]

Thanks, I should have realy thought of the robots.txt!

Its a bit early for me...

Does anyone know of another way I could have the form report how many times it is submited? Perhaps a script that runs when the form is validated and sent.

Im afraid I know little about any scripting, but someone may be able to link me to a nice little copy and paste script. Wishfull thinking I know.

I'll post how I get on with changing the robots.txt

[cgrantski]

If somebody can see the thank you page more than once in a visit, you could look at the number of visits stat for the thank-you page, not the number of hits.

You can also rig the thank-you page so it does not cache or save.

And if you open the raw logs, you might see some POSTs of the order form that don't get reported on. These will only happen once per submission so might be your most accurate option.