Duplicate form submissions

Is it normal to get this many?

[danmccarthy]

I recently designed a simple form to collect feedback from participants in a one-day activity that my organization ran on Wednesday. So far, I have received about 130 responses, with about 10 or 20 that are either duplicates (two emails with the exact same content for all fields) or partial duplicates (two emails with the exact same content, except one is only half filled in).

Is this normal? Do that many people out there in "average user land" not know how to work with web forms? Do those of you monitoring web forms that don't automatically detect duplicates see this many duplicates?

It's a pretty basic form that submits the results to me via email. Obviously throwing it into a database would be a much better option, and then I could check for duplicates before updating the database, but my organization refuses to understand that we need a new hosting plan with PHP/MySQL support. But that's a story for another forum.

Basically I want to make sure this is not something with the design of my form. Maybe there's something I need to work on with the initial focus point, so if people hit enter in the middle of typing, the form doesn't submit? Should I change the field that is initially focused? It seems to default to the "submit" button.

[moltar]

I've never seen that many dups on any of my sites. It all would depend on your market.

Usually dups happen because of slow servers. If a user clicked "submit" and "nothing happens" for a few seconds, they will click again.

You could use a little snippet of JS to disable the submit button [webmasterworld.com] once it's clicked.

[marek]

Dan, do you redirect to a thank you page after the form submission? If you don't, simple browsing back and forth via the browser's back and forward button submits the form again and again.

It's quite normal that people go through a site until they finish an action (e.g. submit a contact form) and then clicks the back button as many times as necessary to leave the site at their starting point.

[danmccarthy]

I do redirect to a thank you page after the form is submitted. As a test, I just submitted the form, let the thank you page load, hit the back button, hit the forward button, and this didn't cause a duplicate of my test submission.