When an action is finished we advise you don't close (unpublish) the form. Even after an action's time is done, and you're no longer promoting it, your landing page may remain a point of contact. Someone may have followed an old link, or heard that the campaign was successful and looked for it - you don't want them to find a dead end.
If you simply close your form, you lose the opportunity to lead them to a different action or to add them to your supporter base, so we recommend using one of the options below to make sure you don’t turn away any potential supporters.
Here are a few different options for when your action is finished:
And here's what to do if you just really need to unpublish the form.
1/ Disable the form (support task)
You can ask support to disable the form for you. This will hide the form fields, and add a message Submissions for this form are closed. Here’s an example of how it will look.
Visitors will still be able to see the copy and images for the action (which you can edit if you wish), and logged-in users will still be able to see all the fields, data and configuration in the ‘edit’ interface. Actions which are disabled in this way will still show in your ‘Manage content’ list as published.
We can enable an interface for this feature in your installation as a billable support request. This may be worthwhile if you run a lot of actions, and would like to be able to do this yourselves. It also allows you to add different text to the standard Submissions for this form are closed. Please contact support for more details.
2/ Redirect traffic to a new location
To retain any traffic that ends up on your form, set up a redirect to an ongoing action, a simple sign up form, or to another location with up to date information about the issue or campaign. To do this, go to: Manage > Advanced Settings > Site Settings and search for 'URL redirects'.
Be sure to redirect your supporters to a page where they not only learn about a new action, but also get information about the results of the old one. That's what brought them here and is interesting to them. So use this information to make the new action more engaging.
Once the redirect is set up, you can unpublish the form if you want to - the redirect will still work. You can take an action back into 'draft' state in the advanced options in the content step.
This means that if you filter your actions so that you only see 'published' actions, it won't appear. This can be helpful if you have a lot of actions in your Impact Stack.
3/ Convert your action to a simple sign up form
Alternatively, you could update the text to provide information about the result of the action. Ask people if they want to leave their email address, so you can let them know about upcoming and ongoing actions.
Be careful: don't delete form fields from your action, hide them instead
Deleting the field deletes all submitted data from this field on this action as well as the field in the form, so the data will no longer be accessible from the webform results.
Instead hide fields that aren't needed any longer - just set them to 'private' and 'not required' in the "Display" tab when editing the form.
The downsides of this approach are:
- you won't be able to go back and view the original content
- your data will be less clearly organised if you have actions and simple sign ups being processed through the same webform node.
So this solution is probably only suitable for a simple petition, if you wanted to just offer people the chance to register interest in the same campaign.
If you really need to unpublish a form
If you have a situation where you do just need to take the form down - for example if you’ve accidentally published a form for a campaign which is not yet ready for launch - you can take it back into a draft state as described above under option 2. If you haven’t set up a redirect, anyone clicking the url will get a 404 ‘page not found’ message, (unless they are logged into your Impact Stack).
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