Egads - need serious help with new html form

[sarb]

Hi, I am new at building forms and of course my first one is rather a complicated one.

I know, I know, the css is pretty bad right now. I've given up on that for the moment and have moved on to just trying to get the form to submit properly and will then spend the majority of the night trying to fix my layout problems. Sometimes I really miss my tables :o .

Anyway, the page is at: http://www.sitesbysarah.com/main_homeloan_form.htm

I followed the steps for CGI scripts at "The cgiemail user guide". I think I have the "action" code typed correctly, but I am getting a "web page cannot be found" error message when I click the submit button.

The pages I am using with this are:
main_homeloan_form.htm
thanks.htm
formresponse.txt

I have placed the "formresponse.txt" document in the cgi-bin folder on my server. There is a cgiemail folder, but it won't let me open that. It keeps asking me what I want to open it with. Don't know why.

Any help you could provide would be appreciated.

Sarb

[Major Payne]

Do you have proper form processing in your cgi-bin? Aside from getting this "The requested URL /public_html/cgi-bin/formresponse.txt was not found on this server.", it also generates a 404 error. That doesn't seem like the correct form processor.

You might also think about having that form filled out on a secure page. Some sensitive information being given.

Ron

[ray326]

I'd have to say your form action absolutely is not right. The "public_html" probably shouldn't be in there and I doubt something named *.txt will be a program or a script.

[sarb]

Ok, a couple more questions :)

How do I find out if I have the proper form processing in my cgi-bin? Do I just contact the host and ask them? Or is there something I can do from my computer to check this?

Also, you mentioned having the page filled out on a secure page. Can you elaborate on that? Don't really know anything about secure pages. How do I go about doing that?

I will remove the public_html from the action. I thought maybe it wasn't working originally because I didn't have the full path name, but that doesn't seem to help either.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions...
Sarb

[Major Payne]

If you have an FTP program, log in so you can see your entire file structure on your site. Look for folder called cgi-bin. Click on it and see what is listed in the folder. You may have a file called forms.cgi or something like that. This may be all under a folder outside your root directory and called .panel. If you don't use an external FTP program, then log in to your Control Panel then using your File manager tool, look for the same thing.

You are doing an eCommerce site. I'm sure your Control panel has instructions on how to set this up. You should have noticed some sites use https:// when you are filling out sensitive data forms on their site.

Ron