Publishing a form and what each status means
Publish your form to make it live, and understand Draft, Published and Archived — including why a link can say the form is not accepting responses.
A form is only reachable by the outside world once it is published. Publishing is a single click, and it is also what creates your first share link.
Publishing
- Open the form from Forms, then All Forms.
- Check it over with Preview — nothing submitted in preview is recorded.
- Click Publish in the builder header.
Publishing does two things at once: it sets the status to Published, and it creates a share link named Default. The Publish button is then replaced by a Share button that takes you to the Share Links page.
The three statuses
- Draft — the form is still being built. Share links will not open it. You can still preview it, and your team can still edit it.
- Published — the form is live. Its share links work, and responses are recorded against your account.
- Archived — the form has been retired. It no longer accepts responses, but every response already collected is kept and stays available in Responses, Reports and exports.
To take a live form offline, save it back to Draft from the builder. Its share links stop opening immediately, and nothing you have already collected is touched. Editing a published form asks you to confirm first, because your changes go live to anyone holding the link.
Opening and closing on a schedule
A published form can also be given a start date, an end date, or a maximum number of responses in its settings. Before the start date a visitor sees "This form is not open yet"; after the end date, "This form has closed"; once the cap is reached, "This form is no longer accepting responses". These are separate from the status, and they apply even while the form is Published.
Why a link might still not work
If a recipient reports a problem, the page they see names the cause. The two most common are a form left in Draft, which reads "This form is not currently accepting responses", and a waiver whose public web link has never been switched on, which reads "This link is no longer available". Waivers are private by default — see Send a form or waiver link to someone for the setting that opens them up.
Publishing is available to Managers and above.