If I create forms using JotForm, can I share them so others, perhaps with free accounts, could use them?

Seasonal greetings and very best for 2021 (it can't be harsher than 2020 can it?!)

I am effectively the sole worker in a zero income not-for-profit: CORE System Trust (www.coresystemtrust.org.uk) We provide our copyright but free to use report forms designed primarily to measure change in psychotherapies but actually used for all manner of mental health and wellbeing assessment. With cv-19 many therapists moved from working f2f to working online and wanted to continue to use CORE measures so I made up various options including fillable PDFs which personally I hate but which satisfied our requirements that they could be free to use, and, just as importantly, pretty easy to use, for therapists many of whom are making very little from their work or working pro bono for charities and equally many of whom are pretty IT illiterate (certainly the older ones!) However, fillable PDFs and iPhones and iPads don't seem to collaborate well and I'm looking for alternatives that would still be free and easy for people to use. JotForm seems impressive and one therapist has used your system to create a copy of a CORE form (which we allow as long as the content isn't changed) but she would prefer to have one I made up and approved so I wondered if it was possible for me to create an account, probably your bronze one, at least for a while, and make up forms. That would only make sense though if there were some easy way that people on the free or bronze levels could use the forms I made easily. Is that possible? (I may have missed an obvious answer to this on your site: apologies if so!)

TIA,

Chris

There are different ways on how you can share the form. If you only need to share the form URL, you can get the URL and share that with others. To get the form URL, please see this guide https://www.jotform.com/help/401-Where-to-Find-My-Form-URL.

Another way is to have it clone by them https://www.jotform.com/help/42-How-to-Clone-an-Existing-Form-from-a-URL. You can also assign the form with your colleagues, here's how https://www.jotform.com/help/652-adding-assignees-to-your-form.

Wow, that was fast! I think that, maybe, the clone form option would be the nearest to what I want but I think it's not really what I want. I should be more specific! What I want, in an ideal world, would be a way to provide a template form that people could not change but could import/clone/copy into their own JotForm account, and perhaps then mount a link to in their own web site, and that would then just work for them. Your clone looks a bit like the Google form sharing and I had to give that up (because of a stupid decision by Google) or like the M$oft forms (which most therapists can't use as it would cost them too much to be realistic). Ideally I really want the form not to be alterable, just fillable (like a locked/password protected fillable PDF) though I can perhaps live with not having that. What I absolutely need is zero danger that the cloned form continues to share data back to me (which is pretty much the default with Google's form sharing and I couldn't get therapists to do the step in the Google system that breaks that).

I guess this boils down to two questions:

1) Can JotForm clone/share locked forms that would neither allow nor need any editing?

2) Is there zero danger of cloned forms sharing data back to the person who created the original form?

Thanks again: impressed by your product and your speed!

Chris

Hello Chris,

A form can be password protected, but it cannot be cloned when it is password protected.

Unfortunately, when you clone a form into another JotForm account there is no option to prevent editing of fields, as the cloned form is present in another account (who has cloned the form into their account).

If the form is cloned into another account, it will anyway not be present in the original form owner's account. Also, the notification email will automatically fetch the email address of the account where the form is cloned into. So the data will not be sent back to the original form owner.

I hope this answers your query.

Got it:

1) - "No"

2) - "Yes, it's safe"!

OK. I'd recommend you putting the idea of locked but clonable forms somewhere in your possible enhancements as I think there would be a small, hm, actually not necessarily that small, market for it. Particularly in the academic research field there are a lot of measures that ideally should not be changed at all, so as to keep comparability of findings, but which people might want to make available to others to use for free, as we do. There is also market, but this would be a slightly different tweak to your product, of forms that are copyright and that the owners might want to charge for usage, either to buy a copy for then unlimited reuse, or for use in limited numbers. That business is big money on paper and with the shift away from paper, and the acceleration of that with cv-19, that market will probably be moving radically toward online completions. I am sure the big players will roll their own but the small vendors might welcome paying for you to do the work on the form design and locking as you're clearly way ahead of where they can get on their own.

Coming back to what I need: I'll ponder it! Many thanks again,

Chris

P.S. every time I submit an answer here I get an "unauthorised access" message despite the fact the message is recorded (and answered in double quick time!) You might want to look into that.

It could be an access issue as you have used your email address to create a ticket not your account.

I have set your ticket to public so that you would not receive such errors anymore.

If you need further assistance, let us know.