Any help or direction for further assistance will be highly appreciated.

I have an issue and don't know how to solve it:

I have a form that allows users to input their action items that they need to take care of for the upcoming month in several textboxes.
Once they hit save, it adds these action items to a log form with:
a radio button to select "open" or "closed - considered the status title
a text box for due date - considered the DUE Date of the action items
another text box for closed date - considered Closed date of the action items

We set the Status to automatically check "open" when saved
and we also set the due date to be set automatically as the current date + 30 days.

Problem with this:
what is happening now, there are times not all text boxes have action items so when the user clicks save, it automatically checks the status as "open" and places a due date when THE TEXT BOXES HAVE NO ACTION ITEM.

Now, some users are not leaving the box blank and instead puts:
"N/A", "No Action item to report", "None" etc....

Question:
How can I have the log not except dates or select a status option when there are no action item to report?
I need a logic to place in the code, but for the life of me I don't see how to do this.