Help Center menu

Respondents stuck on validation errors

If a respondent reports they can't get past a required field, walk through the block-specific validation rules.

Email validation

The Email block enforces a basic format check (name@domain.tld). Common reasons it rejects an entry:

  • Leading or trailing spaces around the address — paste-then-trim is needed.
  • Missing TLD: foo@bar without the .com will fail.
  • Quoted local parts or unusual characters that strict regex doesn't allow.

We do not verify the address actually receives mail — that requires sending a confirmation email, which NodumForms doesn't do by default.

Phone validation

The Phone block is lenient. It accepts digits, spaces, dashes, parentheses, and the + symbol. International numbers with country codes are fine. We don't validate the country code matches the digit count.

Common reasons it rejects: letters in the entry, or unusual punctuation like periods between digits.

File upload validation

Files must be:

  • Under the per-file size limit (default 5MB, configurable per block up to ~25MB).
  • Within the file count limit (default 5 files per submission, configurable per block).
  • One of the allowed formats: PDF, DOC, DOCX, PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF, WEBP. ZIPs, EXEs, and other formats are rejected.

If the respondent uploads multiple files and one is too large, the whole batch is rejected — they need to remove the offending file and retry.

Required vs optional

A red asterisk (✱) next to the question label means the block is required. The Submit button is disabled until every required field has a value. Optional blocks can be left blank.

Rating blocks

A required Rating block won't accept a submission of 0 (no rating selected). The respondent has to click a star/number to pass.

What respondents see

Validation errors appear inline below the offending field with red text. The page also scrolls to the first error on submit so the respondent doesn't have to hunt.

When to be lenient

Mark blocks as Required only when you genuinely can't act on the submission without that field. Over-requiring causes drop-off — especially on phone numbers and company names.

Give feedback

Was this resource helpful?

|

Up next

A response is missing from my dashboard

If a respondent says they submitted but you don't see the response, work through these in order.

Read more

FAQs

Either the form is unpublished, or it has a Closes at date in form settings that's now in the past. Republish from the builder or clear / extend the Closes at field.

Confirm Email notifications is on in form settings and the notify-to address is correct. Then check spam — add notifications@nodumforms.com to your safe-senders list if your mail provider is filtering us.

Always preview from a real mobile device or use Chrome DevTools' mobile emulator. Common culprits are very long question text on Short Text blocks (use Long Text instead) and cover images that are too tall vertically.