Hello,
In many situations I have a form that is public-facing that needs to go live at a specific date and time. I don't want the form accessible before then, so I usually end up logging in late at night the day before to publish.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and a recent post from another user asking about something similar made me think it was worth mentioning.
What I envision is an option in the Publish section that would allow an optional start/end datetime so we could do the following:
- Publish as we do now (immediate and always up)
- Schedule publishing (not available until a specific datetime)
- Schedule availability (only available between two datetimes)
- Schedule an end date (immediate but only up until a specific datetime)
This would be great for forms that have a limited window or need to "launch" at a very specific day and time, and it would provide a lot of flexibility.
As a secondary request, I'd love if we could create a custom "unavailable" page that would be displayed when the form is marked as published but it is outside of the availability start/end date.
For example, if the form is set to launch on a specific date, we could use the page to explain when it will be made available (with the start/end dates as variables perhaps) so they can check back rather than just seeing an error message.
This kind of interim page would be extremely helpful because we often have to announce when we will be launching a new process well in advance, and people inevitably contact us about the "bad" link since we don't want to turn it on right away and get submissions before the official start date.
EDIT: It looks like this has been requested before many years ago, so I think there's some good use cases.