It may come to pass that our form is so inundated with submissions that the user responsible for administering the data requests us to close the form for a time. All the administrative functions will be available to suitably authorized administrators, but site visitors will not be able to make any new submissions. This will allow our administrators the time to adequately deal with the submissions they have before we reopen the floodgates.
Under the heading of Status of this form on the Form settings page, we select the Closed option. When the time comes to reopen the form to traffic, we merely select the Open option to enable new submissions to be accepted.
This function is no more than an on-off switch. When the form is set to Closed, the node is still available to visitors and will still exist in our site menus, but none of the input fields will be available. Visitors will be shown a message stating that the form is currently closed for submissions.
In the previous recipe, we learned that Webform can be set up to close forms automatically based on one or more criteria. Here we have seen that we may also manually close a form to submissions.
As we can see, using this option to set the form as Closed does not prevent anyone from reaching the form at its URL. It merely prevents anyone from actually submitting data via the form.
To make the form node completely inaccessible we would need to implement an access control solution (such as the Taxonomy Access or Node Privacy by Role modules), or even unset the published status of the node entirely.