phone number validation / preventing invalid phone numbers being entered into a form

[Anonymous]

Has anyone come up with a way to prevent their Marketo forms from allowing invalid or dummy phone number. For example, I would love to prevent a user from entering one of the following types of invalid/dummy phone numbers:  123-456-7890, 987654321, 1111111111, 3333333333, 5555555555 as well as non-numberic values. If anyone has found a way to do this within Marketo, I would appreciate any suggestions. 

Thanks,
 

David

[Anonymous]

Hey David,

The forms 2.0 functionality should natively prevent non-numeric values from being entered on your phone number fields. As for fake or dummy numbers, I don't think there's a great way to do this on the form-end, but you could build a smart campaign to watch for dummy/invalid data coming through the phone number field, and have it null out the field when it finds a match. The only problem with this is you'd need to account for a lot of different situations in your smart list filters. For example:

Phone number starts with: 12345
Phone number is 555-555-5555
Phone number is 867-5309
and so on.

It won't cover every circumstance, but it should help keep some of the crap out of your system. You could even build an initial scrubber with some of the values you've seen so far, and then have it run for a few months, checking back to see what it might have missed, and then add those missed number combinations to your filter to strengthen it further.

Just an idea!

Hope this helps,

-Jeff

[Anonymous]

To echo what Jeff is suggesting, you could also change the field type on the Forms 2.0 form Phone Number field to Text, and enable Input Masking to ensure that any data entered will be normalized against a common standard. This would make your data clean-up smart campaigns easier to manage from an edge case perspective.

[Anonymous]

Hey David,

If you have a developer on-hand, you could enlist their help to leverage our forms 2.0 js api to do additional client-side validation on the forms.  Please reference this page: http://developers.marketo.com/documentation/websites/forms-2-0/

If you reference the last example given on this page: "9. Show a custom error message on submit based on custom business logic" it shows how to build in additional logic that will prevent the form from submitting unless certain conditions are met.

Hope this hepls point you in the right direction. 

Thanks,

Jason