At Solutions we're big believers in making it easy, well, as a general note, but especially when it comes to interacting with your website's community.

Requesting various sorts of information from your community is common and easy with various types of forms - be it polls, enquiry forms, application or registration forms.

When setting up these sorts of forms it is important to remember what information is really going to be useful and which fields should actually be required.

Each form field added to a form brings that slight extra chance that a user will abandon the process. Each required field bringing more of a chance that a user will not be willing to provide this information and either abandon the process or give you false or inaccurate data just to get the form submitted.

Tear down the road blocks. Things such as non-standard input elements, any elements requiring anything more than typing and clicking, such as multiple select elements requiring CTRL+click to use.

Keep things simple and to the point when interacting with your community...

CAPTCHA code fields, fields requiring the user to enter in letters / numbers to ensure an additional layer of security, we believe should be used only after repeated attempts by the same user on a form. Let's not complicate things!

In other words, keep things simple and to the point when interacting with your community. You'll always get the best results.