Submission rules
Submission rules for Tessolo forms: allow one answer per person, close the form at a set time, or cap the number of places or responses.
Open Forms for the site, pick the form, and open Form settings. Under Submission rules there are three switches. They apply to any form — a survey, a sign-up, a contact form.
One submission per person
Once that browser has submitted, reopening the page shows already submitted instead of the form.
On the server Tessolo de-duplicates by the email address in the response. With no email field it falls back to "same network and byte-for-byte identical answers".
This is not identity verification. A different browser, a cleared cache or a phone can submit again. If you need a strict one-per-person, add a required email field — that's what actually does the work.
The network fallback is deliberately weak so it can't lock out a whole office or campus: colleagues on one network are only treated as duplicates if their answers are exactly identical, which real answers never are.
Closes at
Pick a date and time and the form stops accepting answers then. After that visitors see the message you set under Message shown after it closes — leave it empty for the default.
The time is saved in your computer's time zone, and it's an instant, not a local midnight: whatever country a visitor opens the page from, it closes at the same moment.
Response cap
Set a number of places. The settings panel shows progress — 42 of 100 received — and once it's reached the form closes itself with the same message.
Use it for anything with real capacity: workshop seats, sample kits, a limited coupon batch.
A cap is not a queue. Two people submitting at the same moment near the limit can both get through. For a handful of places over a busy minute, set the cap a little below the number you can actually honour.
What a visitor sees
| State | On the page |
|---|---|
| Open | The form |
| Closed by time | Your closing message |
| Cap reached | Your closing message |
| Already submitted (one per person on) | Already submitted |
Closed and capped forms stay on the page — the page doesn't 404, and everything around the form still reads normally. If you'd rather the whole page go away, unpublish it instead.
Keeping the page honest
None of these rules change what the page says. A page promising "open until Friday" with a closing time set to Wednesday is your problem, not Tessolo's. When you set a closing time, check the copy above the form.