Forms Disappeared?

[Jon Gertken]

Hi,

I've got a few Forms that have recently "disappeared". After some digging the common denominator is that the user that created these forms was recently purged from AD. When the user left the company, these Forms were shared out with other users, and the creators account was disabled, but still in AD, so the Forms were still active and functional.

Basically what I want to know is this some sort of bug? Working as intended? Or possibly something else afoot?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

From what I gather, this is expected and isn't a bug. An option would be to move these Forms into a group, which I understand would preserve the Forms independently of any individual users.

Transfer ownership of your form

Just to add some additional info from the FAQ:

The original owner of a form is no longer with my organization and/or their Microsoft Forms license has been removed. What happens to the data that is associated with the form they created?

All account-related data will be deleted 30 days after a user account has been deleted from your tenant (Azure AD).

[#3]

Fair enough.

Would moving a Form to a group by default make anyone in that group a collaborator on said Form?

One way to address this is we created a Forms service account independent of an actual user to serve as the owner of some Forms.

[#4]

Yes to your first point, that's how I understand it works "you can easily move it to a group so everyone in your group becomes owners of that form".  It's a nice feature by the looks of it, preserving responses, existing links will still work and new responses will continue to be captured.

Your second point, yes that could work also, I'd personally try out group forms first and see if that would be more suitable.       

[#5]

@Jon Gertken 

For me, forms got disappeared from my account just with clearing the browser cache. 

I can open the read only form - https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=Wht7-jR7h0OUrtLBeN7O4cteu_ZQ72BDo8F-PyXR2MRURDVM...

But can't access it in my account to get details of the responses.

Has anyone encountered this?

[#6]

@Vinit2k2c this also happened to me, were you able to access your responses in the end

[#7]

@kscollon I created a form which disappears from the "My Forms" list as soon as I close my browser window. I was able to go back to my history to pull up the page where you can view the form and responses, but this is the only way I could get back to the form. It's very frustrating and disappointing.

I tried to create a new duplicate form to see if it would save:

I create the new form with title only --> it saves and shows up under "My Forms"

I add one question (date question) --> it saves and continues to be listed under "My Forms"

I add a second question (free text) --> it saves and continues to be listed under "My Forms"

I add a third question (free text) --> the form has now disappeared from "My Forms" with no way to retrieve it other than going to my browser's history.

[#8]

@Jon Gertken hi - i have had an important MS forms just disappear and can see you may have had the same thing a while back - did you find a way of retrieving this?

Thank you 

[#9]

Mine was related to a user account being removed from AD. If a user didn't move it to a Group Form or have someone else recreate it, I would assume it's likely lost for good.

As far as the browser cache/history issue, I have not run into this problem personally.