can anyone point me towards learning how to do form validation with asp classic and not .net? or some sort of easy to implement solution using javascript or cgi or something?

thanks!

it's just the same process in any language,

user submits form,

grab submitted variables,
check value and type are in range/present

Branch:  __   Ok; accept and continue
          |
          |___ Error; Return to user with error.

You could use regular expressions in classic asp

Function validateEmail(email) 
  Set regEx = New RegExp 
  regEx.IgnoreCase = False
  regEx.Pattern = "^[\w-\.\+]{1,}\@([\da-zA-Z-]{1,}\.){1,}[\da-zA-Z-]{2,6}$" 
  validateEmail = regEx.Test(Trim(email)) 
End Function

If Request.Form.Count > 0 Then
  If validateEmail(Request.Form("email")) Then
    Response.Write("You Entered a Valid Email Address")
  Else
    Response.Write("You Didnt Enter a Valid Email Address")
  End If
End If

Usage:

<form name="email" method="post" action="">
<input name="email" type="text"><input name="" type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>

The function returns a boolean value wich you can easily use to validate your form

What Chris and Daniel said. The exact nature of form validation depends on the form and what you want validated, but pretty well anything can be checked using classic ASP.

Ideally, you'd want to do as much validation as possible in client script, which can be disabled, but most people leave javascript running, and this will save you bandwidth and the user response time in 90 % of error cases.