I'm in a weird situation. I just found out that near 50% of my users don't have javascript enabled. Most of my website is based on a lengthy search function. Once users click submit, the function executes, and we send them an email when it's finished - this can sometimes take up to 10 minutes.
My issue is that I don't know how to tell users the button was clicked successfully to start this long function if they have javascript disabled. Any ideas?
Once submitted, spawn a php process that does the search and return immediately with the page saying the job was submitted.
The php reference talks about this, with a comment stating that you would call the process using nohup so that it doesn't die when the caller returns. php.net exec function
As an idea: if you can detect, that some users don't have javascript enabled, maybe for that users you will show page without javascript, html with simple 'type="submit"' button?
you can check it on server side... when the form is sent to server just check if the submit button value is set.