I Found a Silent Bug in Formbricks That Crashes Live Surveys at Runtime

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Clear the Lineup powered by Sentry . Project Overview Formbricks is an open-source survey and experience management platform built with Next.js, TypeScript, React, and Tailwind CSS. It lets teams create and deploy surveys across websites, apps, and email. Developers can self-host it or use the cloud version. With over 12,000 GitHub stars and hundreds of contributors, it is one of the most actively maintained open source alternatives to Qualtrics. Bug Fix or Performance Improvement Formbricks supports custom regex validation rules on survey questions. A survey creator can set a pattern that user responses must match before they are accepted. The problem was in how that pattern was stored. The validation schema for regex pattern rules only checked that the input was a non-empty string: // Before the fix export const ZValidationRuleParamsPattern = z . object ({ pattern : z . string (). min ( 1 ), flags : z . string (). optional (), }); z.string().min(1) means "give me any string with at least one character." It does not verify that the string is actually a valid regular expression. So a survey creator could type [invalid as their pattern, the schema would accept it, it would be saved to the database, and then when a real user submitted a response, the system would try to run new RegExp("[invalid") , JavaScript would throw a SyntaxError , and the survey would crash silently at runtime. The bug never surfaced during setup. It only appeared when a real user was trying to submit a real response. Code Pull Request: github.com/Tobore005/formbricks/pull/1 Here is the fix: const isValidRegexPattern = ( pattern : string ): boolean => { try { new RegExp ( pattern ); return true ; } catch { return false ; } }; const isValidRegexFlags = ( flags : string | undefined ): boolean => { if ( flags === undefined ) return true ; try { new RegExp ( "" , flags ); return true ; } catch { return false ; } }; export const ZValidationRuleParamsPa