What happens when a visitor submits your form, leaves a comment, or sees a popup

Who this page is for

You are a site admin and something unexpected happened on your public site. Maybe a form does not seem to capture every submission. Maybe a blog comment vanished. Maybe an age-gate modal keeps coming back. This page explains — at a level you can use without being an engineer — what SGEN does behind the scenes when a visitor interacts with your site, so you know which screen to check and which settings to toggle.

If your real question is "how do I build a form?" — that's in Forms → Create a new form, not here. If your question is "how do I moderate comments?" — that's Discussions → Manage discussions, not here. This page is about the "between click and save" plumbing.

The five visitor actions SGEN handles automatically

Every time a visitor does one of these, SGEN runs a small behind-the-scenes action and writes a row somewhere you can later view in your admin.

What the visitor sees — and what you see

When a form submit succeeds

The visitor sees a green banner on your form:

A minute later, you see a row appear in Forms → Submissions:

The Email Sent column tells you whether your notification email went out. Source tells you whether the visitor landed on your site directly or from Google, Facebook, etc. — SGEN captures that automatically.

When a visitor saves a draft of a long form

If your form is long (multi-page application, detailed questionnaire), visitors often start filling it and leave. If the form is built with draft autosave turned on, SGEN silently saves what they typed so they can return and finish.

The visitor sees a subtle "Draft saved" indicator on the form. You see an entry in Forms → Submissions → Draft:

If the visitor returns and completes the form, the draft is promoted to Submitted automatically. If they never return, the draft sits there — useful if you want to reach out about abandoned applications.

When a visitor leaves a comment on a blog post

If discussions are enabled for a post, the visitor fills the comment form, clicks Submit, and sees one of these confirmations — depending on your auto-approve setting:

On your side, the comment appears in Discussions with status Approved or Pending:

Five things that can go wrong — and how to fix them

"Some of my form submissions are going missing"

The most common cause is your form page being served from a cache (CDN). When a site is cached, the security token inside your form gets stored alongside the rest of the page — so every visitor past the first gets the same token. SGEN is cautious and rejects submissions where the token does not match the visitor's own browser session, which means submissions silently fail for those visitors.

What to check:

1. Do you have Cloudflare, a WordPress cache plugin you migrated from, or a similar CDN in front of your site? If yes, that is the likely cause.
2. Purge the cache for your form page.
3. Ask your hosting provider or CDN admin to set Cache-Control: no-store on pages that contain forms (and blog posts that accept comments).

If the problem persists after cache purge, contact SGEN support with the form URL and a count of submissions before/after the drop.

"I'm getting hundreds of spam submissions suddenly"

A bot has found your form and is submitting repeatedly. The fastest fix on your side:

1. Open the form in the builder (Forms → Edit → Config).
2. Turn on Enable reCAPTCHA.
3. Save.

If reCAPTCHA was already on and spam is still flowing, check Forms → Integrations to ensure the global reCAPTCHA keys are set. Contact SGEN support if the Integrations page is not loading — there is a known issue with the global integrations UI we are tracking.

"I never get the notification email even though submissions are coming in"

First, open Forms → Submissions and click into the most recent entry. Look at the Email Sent field:

• Yes — your SGEN instance successfully handed the email to your mail provider. If the email never arrived, the problem is downstream: check spam folders, check with your mail provider about filtering / deliverability, verify your From address is valid for your domain.
• No or an error message — open Settings → Mail Config and verify your SMTP credentials are still correct. A common cause is password rotation on your SMTP provider.

If Email Sent says Yes on multiple recent entries but you never receive them, contact SGEN support — there is a known issue where some email delivery failures are silently hidden from non-SuperAdmin admin accounts.

"A visitor says they left a comment but I never saw it"

Usually one of two things:

1. The comment is in Discussions → Pending awaiting your approval. Go there and approve it.
2. The visitor's browser autofill (password manager, form-filler extension) filled a hidden anti-spam field, which SGEN interpreted as a bot and silently dropped the comment while showing a "Thank you!" message to the visitor. You can tell the visitor to try again from an incognito window or with autofill disabled.

"My age-gate modal keeps showing up"

When a visitor clicks Yes on the age-gate, SGEN sets a browser cookie that lasts as long as you configured in Settings. If the modal keeps coming back:

1. Check Settings → Age Verification and confirm the expiry is set to something reasonable (default is 1 day).
2. The visitor may be using incognito / private browsing mode, which clears cookies on close. That is a browser-side behaviour and not something the site can override.
3. If the modal re-appears even within a single session, contact SGEN support — the cookie-set may have failed.

Good use cases

Example 1: Contact form on the Acme Coffee Roasters homepage. Ada Lovelace fills in her name, email, and message on the Contact page and clicks Send. She sees the green "Thanks, Ada Lovelace!" banner immediately. You open Forms → Submissions and see her row with Email Sent = Yes and Source = Direct. You click the row to open the detail view:

Example 2: Multi-page job application with draft autosave. Grace Hopper starts your Barista Job Application form (5 steps). She fills steps 1–3 and closes her laptop. The form autosaved her progress every 30 seconds. You can see the partial submission in Forms → Submissions → Draft. When Grace returns and completes the form the next day, the draft row is promoted to Submitted automatically — you receive one notification email, not multiple. The Draft count in the tab drops back to 0.

Example 3: Blog comment on "Our Coffee Origins" post. Alan Turing leaves a comment asking about Arabica beans. Because your Discussions setting is set to require moderation (auto-approve OFF), he sees "Your comment is awaiting moderation." You find his comment in Discussions → Pending. You click Approve and the comment appears live on the post immediately, no page rebuild needed.

Embedding your form on a page

To show a form on any page of your site, copy the shortcode below and paste it into the page content using the Text Editor or an SGB text block. Replace 1 with your form's ID, which you find in Forms → Edit in the URL bar.

Name *
Email *
Phone
Message *
Send Message

After a visitor submits, SGEN redirects them back to the same page with a ?success=1 query parameter and shows the confirmation banner. If you want to redirect to a different page after submit (for example a dedicated Thank You page), set Mail Settings → Redirect URL on the form to your custom URL.

What NOT to use this page for

• Building forms, styling them, or changing their fields — that is Forms → Create/Edit a form.
• Changing who receives form notifications — that is Forms → Edit → Mail Settings.
• Creating or editing popups — that is Popups.
• Moderating comments in bulk — that is Discussions.
• Setting up the age-gate modal — that is Settings → Age Verification.

This page only describes what happens automatically when a visitor interacts with the public side of your site. It is not a build / edit surface.

How this connects to other features

• Forms — when a visitor submits a form, that flow is what this page describes. The form itself (fields, mail settings, success message, integrations) is built under Forms → Create/Edit.
• Discussions — visitor comments land in Discussions for moderation. Whether they arrive as Approved or Pending depends on your Discussions auto-approve setting.
• Popups — popups are fetched on demand when a visitor's page triggers them (scroll, time-delay, click). Frequency caps respect a per-session counter that increments on every fetch.
• Settings → Age Verification — configures how long the age-gate cookie lasts after a visitor confirms.
• Media Library — form fields that accept file uploads write files into your Media Library automatically. You can review them under Media Library with a filter for "form upload" origin.
• Analytics — form submissions and their source (Direct / Google / Social / etc.) feed the Form Analytics dashboard under Forms → Reports.

Before you start

Nothing to set up — this page describes behaviour that is already running on every SGEN site. It is here so you know where to look when something surprises you on the visitor-facing side.

What success looks like

• A visitor submits a form → green confirmation banner on the page, a new row in Forms → Submissions with Email Sent = Yes, and a notification email in your inbox.
• A visitor starts and abandons a long form → a row in Forms → Submissions → Draft with their partial data. The Draft tab counter is > 0.
• A visitor comments on a blog post → a row in Discussions with status Approved or Pending depending on your auto-approve setting.
• A visitor confirms their age on the age-gate modal → the modal stops appearing for that browser. No row is written anywhere — just a browser cookie.

See also

• Create a new form
• View submissions
• Manage discussions

Last updated 2026-04-23.