Intake Forms

A public form that anyone can fill in — a customer, a colleague in another department, someone with no account at all. Submissions land in a review queue, and you turn the good ones into work items.

Plan: Business and above

Bug reports, feature requests, support tickets, internal IT requests. Anything where the person asking shouldn't have to be in your workspace.

What you can do

  • Build a form with your own fields and point it at a project.
  • Share a public link — submitters need no account and no sign-in.
  • Review every submission in a queue, with all its answers visible.
  • Accept a submission to create a work item in the target project, or Reject it.
  • Auto-email submitters when their request is received and when it's accepted.
  • Give customers one portal link that lists all your active forms and lets them check on their past requests.

Getting started

Create a form

  1. Click Intake Forms in the workspace sidebar.
  2. Click New form.
  3. Set the Form title (this is the heading customers see) and the Target project — accepted submissions become work items there.
  4. Optionally add an intro/description, a default priority for created work items, and a success message shown after someone submits.
  5. Edit the form fields. A sensible default set is pre-filled — Title, Your name, Your email, Category, Urgency, Details.
  6. Click Create form.

📷 Screenshot: The New intake form modal — title, target project, default priority, and the field builder rows.

Field types

Four types: Text, Long text, Email and Dropdown (give it comma-separated options). Each field can be marked Required.

Two rules decide how a submission becomes a work item:

  • The field labelled Title (or, failing that, the first field) becomes the work item's title.
  • Every other filled-in field becomes a labelled line in the work item's description.

So keep a Title field, and keep it first.

Include an Email field. It's how the submitter gets confirmation emails and how they can track their request later. Without it, the submission is anonymous — which is allowed, just less useful.

On the forms list, each form has:

  • Copy link — the public form URL (/intake-api/public/<token>).
  • An open-in-new-tab icon to see the form exactly as a submitter does.

Paste the link in your help centre, an email footer, a support macro, anywhere.

📷 Screenshot: The Intake Forms list showing a form with its target project, field count, default priority, and the Copy link action.

Triaging submissions

Submissions do not become work items automatically. Every one lands as pending and waits for a human.

  1. On the Intake Forms page, switch to the Submissions tab. A badge shows how many are pending.
  2. Each submission shows its title, status, the submitter's email (or by anonymous), when it arrived, and every answer they gave.
  3. Click Accept — a work item is created in the form's target project, using the form's default priority. The submission is marked accepted and shows the new work item's reference.
  4. Or click Reject — the submission is marked closed. No work item is created.

📷 Screenshot: The Submissions tab with a pending submission expanded to show its field answers, and Accept / Reject buttons.

Accepting is idempotent: clicking it twice won't create two work items.

The customer portal

Click Customer portal link in the page header to copy a single link that lists all your active forms for a customer to choose from — plus a "Track my requests" box.

A submitter enters their email there and gets a secure link by email that shows the status of everything they've submitted: Pending review, the work item's current status (To do / In progress / Done), or Closed if it was rejected. The link expires after 30 minutes.

This never reveals whether an email has submissions — the response is the same either way — and the emailed link is the only thing that returns data.

Tips

  • One form per request type. A single sprawling form with a "Category" dropdown gets you sprawling submissions.
  • Set a sensible default priority per form. A form called "Production outage" shouldn't create work items at priority None.
  • Turn a form off with inactive rather than deleting it — the public link stops working but your submission history survives.
  • Write the success message. "Thanks — we triage requests every weekday morning" sets expectations far better than the default.

Limits & good to know

  • Everything is manual. No auto-accept, no routing rules, no assignment on accept. Every submission waits for someone to click Accept.
  • Confirmation and acceptance emails need SMTP. Set it up in the admin panel's Email settings. Without it, submissions still work — the submitter just hears nothing back.
  • No file uploads, no attachments. Text, long text, email and dropdown fields only. No checkboxes, dates, numbers or conditional logic.
  • Rate-limited. A given IP address can submit a handful of times per minute; beyond that it's throttled. Fine for real people, hostile to bots — but there's no CAPTCHA, so a public link on the open internet will eventually attract spam. Watch the queue.
  • The public form is deliberately plain. Standalone, unbranded beyond the "Powered by Coco Kanban" footer. You cannot restyle it or embed it in your own page.
  • No submission editing. You can accept or reject; you can't tweak the answers first. Fix the wording on the work item after it's created.