Personalised forms now all use standard link

All form types which support personalisation now accept standard personalised links. The the last three forms which still used other methods, such as a qrcode, to access personal details, have been converted:

• updates
• renew
• subscribeone

The old method still works for these form types in case someone follows a link in an email sent before this change.

Background

Personalised links provide a way for a link in an email which leads to a page on your website which embeds a Cameo form to identify the recipient of that email to the form. You personalise a link in a template by appending a query parameter msg={insert: email identifier}. As this is a bit fiddly to using the editor’s link controls, a button on the template editor toolbar personalises a link for you.

When you merge, each email (to each individual) gets its own random, unique identifier in place of the substitution. When the recipient clicks on that link, the page your website, and the Cameo form it embeds, receives that identifier in the URL. It uses it to look up the email message in Cameo’s database. That in turn identifies them. That avoids the need for the form to ask who they are.

However, a few forms from the early days did not use this method to identify the visitor. Typically they used the qrcode field instead. Mostly other, more substantial internal changes needed to happen to make this possible. We have now done these. So all forms which support personalisation now do so using the standard personalised link.

Where possible I have updated templates which used older methods. However, it would still be sensible to check your links. At some point in the future we will withdraw the old method.

Updates form

Because the personalised link is more secure, you can (and probably should) choose not to ask for any identifying information at the first step of the updates form when arriving via a personalised link. The three means of identifying the form visitor (email address including optional verification, postcode and qrcode) now have options to allow this.