Machform is really great in a lot of ways and new features that allow forms to have more capabilities are always welcome, but it would be wonderful if more attention was given to providing "back end" features that would help the people who have to maintain Machform. In many cases, these "back end" enhancements to Machform would not require very much effort on the part of the developers, at least compared to new "front end" features such as approval workflow, Google sheets and calendar integration, etc., but they would make the lives of the poor souls (like me!) who have to keep Machform up and running as well as possible for a large number of people at a business or institution much, much easier.
One much needed feature is allowing full administrators of Machform to recover or purge deleted forms from the web interface. In a default installation of Machform, forms that are "deleted" using the web interface are actually just hidden. If you have access to the Machform back-end database [DB] and a certain amount of technical knowledge, you can restore deleted forms. This is great as an insurance policy in case someone accidentally deletes a form and then wants it back, but it causes the Machform database to grow continuously and can cause performance issues. If you have access to the web server Machform is installed on, you can change a configuration file so that deleted forms (and their data) really are removed completely and cannot be recovered. This allows the bloat to be removed from your Machform DB, but you lose your insurance policy against accidental deletion. Not only that, but it only affects forms deleted after the configuration change. Any forms deleted before the configuration change will remain hidden, cluttering up your DB. If you have access to the DB and the know how, you can restore the forms and then delete them completely.
But, since Machform's claim to fame is "ease of use", why should full administrators of Machform need to go to this trouble? And why should you lose your form-recovery insurance policy before you can clean up your DB? At a minimum, the Machform interface should be changed so that anyone who is a full Machform administrator can see a list deleted forms and restore or completely delete them. There should also be an option from the normal form manager interface, only available to full administrators, to completely delete a form, in addition to the "default delete" that just hides the form.
Another feature I feel is essential, although I could grudgingly live without it if the previous features were implemented, is an option to purge all of the forms that are hidden with one click. It would be great if a scheduled process could be set up that would delete all of the hidden forms older than a given age, but now I'm getting fancy.
This feature has been requested before, but not at such excruciating length. For example, here:
Three great feature requests for machforms