Delete a response, and what that means

A test entry you made while building the form, the same enquiry sent twice because the visitor lost patience with a slow connection, a tenancy application withdrawn the same afternoon — responses get deleted for ordinary reasons. The control is a small trash icon, and it is deliberately quick to reach.

What sits behind it is not quick to reverse. There is no bin, no archive and no undo step: the response and everything attached to it go, and formformform keeps no copy on your behalf. This article covers where the control lives, what disappears with the response, and what deleting cannot touch.

Open a form and Submissions is the second of four tabs across the top — Fields, Submissions, Settings, Danger. From your forms list you can skip a step: the Responses button on a form's card lands on the same tab.

Every row in the table ends with a trash icon in a narrow, unlabelled last column. It asks before it acts, so a mis-aimed click costs nothing.

Click a row and the response opens on its own page. The same trash icon sits to the right of the Submission heading and its timestamp, with the same Delete? Yes / No confirmation. Answer Yes and you land back on the Submissions tab rather than on a page that no longer exists.

This is the better route when you are working through a batch, because Newer and Older step between responses in date order — read the one either side before deciding. On an encrypted form it is the only practical route. Those rows all show a padlock and a slice of PGP ciphertext, and the search box has nothing in plain text to match, so the only way to know which response you are removing is to open it with your private key loaded.

Deleting takes the whole record: every answer, the metadata block beneath them — filled time, IP address, browser — and any files the visitor attached. A photo sent to a repair booking form stops being downloadable the moment you confirm.

The counters follow. Total and Today drop by one, as does the submissions figure on the form's card in your forms list, sitting between its field and view counts. Views does not move, because a deleted response does not un-visit the page: a form reading 200 views and 12 responses still reads 200 views afterwards. Export CSV builds the file at the moment you click it, so the next export simply has one row fewer.

Everything that left formformform when the response arrived stays where it went. A webhook you fired at submission time, a Zap that appended a row to a spreadsheet, the notification email sitting in your inbox, a CSV already downloaded to a laptop — deletion touches none of them, and connected apps are told nothing when a response goes.

That matters most when a respondent asks you to erase their data. Deleting the response in formformform is one step; the rest is retracing wherever that submission was forwarded and clearing it there too.

For a whole form, the Danger tab has Delete Form. The dialog names the form and says plainly that it removes the form and all submissions, and it cannot be undone — export first if the answers still have any value. Deleting your account under Settings does the same for every form you own.

If what you actually want is the same questions with an empty response list, do not delete anything. Open the menu on the form's card in your forms list and choose Duplicate. The copy carries the fields, logic and settings across and starts at zero responses; the original keeps its history until you decide otherwise. The duplicate is a new form with its own link, so update anywhere you had shared the old one.