Article | HTML HTTPS Form Submission Error | Feb 2009 | M.McKennedy
I was setting up a web form using SSL so customers could enter their credit card information securely and I received the following error: “Submission Error Thank you for taking the time to submit your information. Unfortunately, we encountered an error during processing. Our servers were unable to determine the origin of the submission and did not receive your information.” After week’s worth of back-and-forth unsuccessful emails between the web host’s support department and myself I decided that the support technician was not doing anything to resolve the issue so I took it upon myself.
It’s common knowledge in the web-world that if you are going to have a place on a website for customers to enter credit card information, that page best be secure. I looked into purchasing an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate but the web host had another option, and this one was free. According to their support documentation I could redirect the url for any page to use this format https://{USERNAME}.{WEBHOST}.com/{PAGE}.html so I setup an .htaccess file to redirect the reservations page to the secure URL within the reservations directory on the server. He is what the .htacess file looked like.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} reservations
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://{USERNAME}.{WEBHOST}.com/reservations/$1 [R,L]
Basically this says to redirect any page within the ‘reservations’ directory to use https.
I set everything up and then tested the form to find that I received the following error:
HTTPS Form Submission Error (click for larger view)
“Submission Error
Thank you for taking the time to submit your information. Unfortunately, we encountered an error during processing. Our servers were unable to determine the origin of the submission and did not receive your information.”
I decided to contact the Support department for the web host and let the professionals figure this one out. The first point of contact was on Monday. The only response I received during the entire week was “unable to replicate the problem. Please try submitting the form again.” I tried submitting the form several times, and from many different locations, each and every time I received the same error but the support representative could not generate the error on her end. Actually this one went through two different support technicians, and neither could come up with anything more than – please try submitting again. I was nearly at the point of dropping the web host for one that provides real support because I really getting sick of reading “sorry, please try submitting again”. Instead, I chose to take matters into my own hands (in hindsight I should have gone this route in the first place) and I began troubleshooting the form on my own.
The original form began like this:
<form id=”reservationrequest” name=”reservationrequest” action=”http://www.{WEBHOST}.com/scripts/formemail.bml” method=”post” onsubmit=”return validRRForm(this)”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”my_email” value=”info@{DOMAIN}.com” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”thankyou_url” value=”http://www.{DOMAIN}.com/contact-confirmation.html” />
I thought to myself “unable to determine the origin of the submission” this must be the key to all this. So I changed the url in the ‘action’ of the form to this:
https://www.{WEBHOST}.com/scripts/formemail.bml
Which changed the form into this:
<form id=”reservationrequest” name=”reservationrequest” action=”https://www.{WEBHOST}.com/scripts/formemail.bml” method=”post” onsubmit=”return validRRForm(this)”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”my_email” value=”info@{DOMAIN}.com” />
<input type=”hidden” name=”thankyou_url” value=”http://www.{DOMAIN}.com/contact-confirmation.html” />
I tested the form and just like that, submission received, no errors at all!
The lesson here is don’t give up! Hopefully, if you were seeing this same HTML form submission error while trying to use https you did a web search and it brought you to this page (or another with the same resolution) and now their isn’t an issue! That is exactly why I posted this tutorial on how to correct the “Our servers were unable to determine the origin of the submission and did not receive your information” error to try to save someone the time of going through some support rep. with no desire for troubleshooting/resolution.
I am sticking with the web host because I have not had any issues with their support department in the past.
I don’t claim to be an expert on HTML forms, SSL, or .htaccess files…I only know that the form validates as XHTML Transitional 1.0 and works in the following browsers: Firefox 3.0.6, IE 7, Google Chrome, Opera 9.2, and Safari (For Windows) 3.2.1.
