iPad Timing out

[prechrchet]

I have a registration form for our church's Vacation Bible School (a one week summer program for kids) located here: http://fbcflaglerbeach.com/vbsreg.html

It works fine except for one issue:

I have some people that need to use an iPad to fill it out, but they are getting "session has timed out" before they can complete it.

Any suggestions on what I can do to fix this?

 

[madgibbon]

Just had a look at the HTML code for the page and there nothing unusual going on. Do you have an iPad yourself, if so have you tried an alternative browser such as Chrome?

The web server may have a session timeout value set (which you should have with online forms for security reasons). It usually takes people longer to complete forms using touch screen devices so it may exceed this value.

One word of caution though, you are capturing people's personal details and sending them over unsecured connection (http). You should be using a secured connection such as SSL (https). Should anything happen to the data between the user's web browser and it hitting the VBS mailbox your organisation could be held responsible.

 

[prechrchet]

You are absolutely right, I need to look at a secure way of setting the form up.

Question about the timeout issue: how do I fix it? Should I change the timeout value? Or is there something else I can/should do?

 

[charlituna]

As weird as it sounds, the best answer might be to not do it yourself. There are several companies that specialize in this kind of thing and many give nice discounts to non profits especially for free events.

As I recall from signing my nephews up for it last year, even Apple outsources for their summer camp signups.

 

[madgibbon]

You will probably need to speak to the company you've used to host the form. Most hosting providers don't allow users to configure timeout values. It also depends on the type of server used for hosting (IIS, Apache etc).

As the previous poster has said it might be worth asking a third party to do it for you. Also many web hosting companies provide secure contact forms as a "Web out of the box solution" sometimes for free.

It's a shame I wasn't tied up with other things as I would have done it for you (my 9-5 job is a Web Analyst Programmer)