UPDATE (6:45pm): Service is gradually becoming available to all affected regions. We have switched to a different DNS service provider to circumvent the current instability with Softlayer DNS servers.

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FormAssembly.com is currently affected by a DNS outage at our hosting facility (Softlayer.com).

Access to our service has been intermitently unavailable from some locations throughout the morning.

Our monitoring service is reporting 14mn of downtime in the last 24 hours, but some users may have been affected for a much longer time.

We do not have an ETA for a complete resolution at this time.  We’ll update this post as new information is available.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and working diligently to get this issue resolved.

We’ve just posted three new tutorials to help you get acquainted with and use the Form Builder more effectively.

The Introduction tutorial is a basic overview of the Form Builder. This will be helpful if you are new to the Form Builder or need a refresher course. This tutorial covers the basic elements of the Form Builder (toolbar, preview pane, Outline, Properties panel and Advanced panel).

The Grid Layout tutorial describes how to effectively use the grid (table) layout in your forms. Grid layouts are especially helpful when you need to collect multiple pieces of related information. Questions are displayed in a single row. The tutorial also demonstrates how to create a repeatable section or question.

The Conditional and Calculated Questions shows how to create a question that only appears when users select a specific answer to a preceding question. Conditional questions can keep your form from being needlessly long and confusing by hiding questions that are irrelevant to certain respondents. This tutorial also shows how to create questions that calculate a numeric total; for instance, that calculate the cost of club membership.

We hope you find these tutorials helpful and that they make your experience at FormAssembly.com more enjoyable.  We would love to hear your feedback on these tutorials and any ideas you have about tutorials you’d like to see in the future.

UPDATE (7/16): The issue is now resolved. Forms are no longer affected by the incorrect report.

Our service is currently impacted by an incorrect report to Google’s web-forgery (a.k.a phishing) list.  Visitors trying to access a form hosted on FormAssembly.com using Firefox 3.0 or above may in some cases run into a ‘web-forgery’ warning message and be blocked from seeing and filling out the form.

Who is affected:

Your form is not affected by this issue if you are hosting the form on your own site, or if you linked  to it using the public address as it is presented in the ‘Publish’ tab under your account (it looks like this: http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/1 with the last number being different for each form). This should be the case for the vast majority of our users.

Your form is affected only if you somehow obtained the alternative format for the public address and used it in your link. It looks like this: http://app.formassembly.com/index.php?url=/forms/view/1. These types of addresses are currently blocked for visitors using Firefox 3.0 or above.

What you can do if you are affected:

If possible, change the link that points to your form to use the normal public address, as displayed in the ‘publish’ tab under your account. If you can’t change this link, we expect the issue to be fully resolved within a couple days.

What we did to remediate this issue:

We asked Google to remove our site from the list. We are not sure what is Google’s turnaround on this. We are assuming a day or two and hopefully this will all be settled soon.

Why did this happen:

Malicious users sometimes try to abuse our service by creating ‘phishing’ web forms (a.k.a web forgery). We take those forms down as they are reported to us or as they are caught in our automated filters, but it looks like this time the abuse was reported directly to Google’s ‘web forgery’ list.

Unfortunately, Google did not choose to just block the incriminated form. They indiscriminately blocked all our forms, which of course is now affecting legitimate users with legitimate forms.  We are lucky that only a small number of forms end up being affected, but we are quite upset at the manner this list is managed. We did not receive any advance warning from Google nor Mozilla, and we can only hope that they are as prompt to remove sites from the list as they are to add them to it.