hi guys.  one contact form question in three parts.  consider this an apology in advance.

i’m trying [really] to make a customized contact form with several textarea fields.  the resulting email will be read by not-so-technical people, so it needs to be more readable than not.

1. can hard returns be added in the form, possibly by using a \n or something of that nature?

2. the form is still not redirecting correctly; it’s going to the user message template for the first submittal, but if i click the ‘back’ button and submit again, it redirects to the correct page. [?]

3. i’m now getting an error message that says i’ve exceeded the maximum number of emails per day.  wha?

Here’s the code, stripped down to one textarea [there are 4 more]:

any help or a nudge in the right direction would be outstanding.  is there detailed contact form documentation located anywhere so i can stop bugging you fine folks?

You can find the contact form documentation in the manual.

1. What are you asking about, specifically?  Do you mean can you use the return/enter key while in a textarea field?  Yes.  Or are you perhaps asking how to add line breaks to the email output that you receive?

You might look at the Plugin Submission form on the EE Plugins site.  It uses a fairly complex Contact Form including a number of hidden fields that are used for formatting the email output.

2. How is it not redirecting correctly?  If you’re trying to include multiple textareas, then it may be an issue of EE thinking you don’t have a required field filled in.

For instance, from your above snippet you don’t have the “subject” field specified.  It should be like this:

<p>subject:<br/>
<input type=“hidden” name=“required[]” value=“subject: ” />
<input type=“text” name=“subject” size=“40” maxlength=“35” /></p>