Provide a Submit form

Not only is it easier it's also beneficial to you because your email adress isn't being exposed.

Provide a Submit form

Not only is it easier it's also beneficial to you because your email adress isn't being exposed.

Good point!

Submission form also adds credibility.

Another note regarding submission forms: If somebody is accessing your site from some computer other than theirs (a friend's computer, or a library terminal, for example), then the e-mail utility might not be set up with the relevant e-mail address, or might not be set up at all. By providing a feedback form, people can contact you from these other places, with your reply reaching them when they get back home.

Eliz.

Submission forms are great but there are some cons to them too, mostly in the user friendliness areas:

- One is never sure if the form actually worked. Many non-technical users don't trust unfamiliar programs, they know and trust their email client. Also with all the phishing sites around, there's added stress that their data is going to the wrong place.

- Visitors have to type in their email address, this is not much better than copy and pasting your email address into their client. And if they make a typo it's very hard/impossible to reply to them. At least if they make a typo in their email client, there's a reasonable chance they'll get a delivery failure notice.

- Usually the form doesn't allow for attachments (which may be a good thing), so one has to go through an extra round of emails to send a file (e.g. screenshot of a bug).

- Bugs in the submission form's underlying code leave it open to hacking.

I do generally prefer e-mail myself, because then I've got a local copy of what I sent. But...

borntobeweb said: One is never sure if the form actually worked.

You can have unexpected delivery problems with e-mail, too.

borntobeweb said: Also with all the phishing sites around, there's added stress that their data is going to the wrong place.

Would that be a problem with a reputable site...?

borntobeweb said: And if they make a typo it's very hard/impossible to reply to them.

If you provide an auto-response, and tell users to expect this in their Inbox, then they should know fairly quickly and reliably whether or not their form-submission worked.

borntobeweb said: Bugs in the submission form's underlying code leave it open to hacking.

This is a valid point. And even secured forms allow morons to send you, the webmaster, loads of cr@p, which is a definite "down side"!

Eliz.

I have always had mixed feelings about this area.

I generally prefer to use my own email so that I can keep copies and feel a slight distrust of sites that hide their email address. On the other hand, as a webmaster, I embraced forms gladly when creating a new site because of the sheer volume of spam that was hitting my old mailbox.

The era of nicely using simple forms for contact purposes has gone.
Simple forms are now attracting massive amounts of spam from auto-bots. If you want to use a form now it has to be driven by some database back end and incorporate some 'captcha' type of technology - if you(or your clients) want a quiet life.

After 6 years, I removed the contact form from my main site 3 months ago. I also took them off 16 other sites I manage. The spam had gotten unmanageable and I'd gotten tired of fighting it. Renaming the scripts would sometimes help but I was having to do it every 2 or 3 months so I finally conceded defeat and yanked them all out. I had the same problem with 5 guestbooks I'm responsible for installing, all of which are currently disabled until I figure out how to make them spam proof. Captcha looks like the way to go but I've only had time to look at it briefly.

I don't think I've sacrificed any credibility in doing this. In place of the contact forms I have 2 javascript encrypted mailto links and 2 phone numbers. Anyone with any questions is still free, and is in fact encouraged, to contact me, they're just not going to do it from an onsite form. I've found that the people who make the effort to pick up the phone and call are generally the people I want to be dealing with anyway.

There's many things you can do to stop spam and layers of preventive measures are preferable but the single best thing I've come across and use is quite simple and for all intents and purposes impossible for a bot to circumvent. It would require human intervention.

Ask a question, wrong answer and it gets sent back to the form. For my forms I use something on the page itself, usually a undelined word in paragraph above the form, What word is underlined in the pargraph above?

The key is that it's unique and would be for every site that used it.

I agree, the real problem with site forms is everyone finds and downloads a free one and then blames the form or processor. You don't even need to use a captchka or any other human interaction to stop bot spam. You need someone that can program bot spamming out by cleansing the data and use the same model the spammers are using against you: observe what they are doing, how they are doing it, and block up those holes. There are many way to do this, discussed at great length here if you're willing to do the work.

By tossing out forms and displaying an email address, all you're doing is submitting your customer to a different kind of spam, one that a different bot attacks. The email address winds up in a mailing list farmed by an email spider. So now you have spam coming from somewhere that has nothing to do with the website, and there is **nothing** you can do to stop it other than losing half of your valid email in a faulty mail filter.

Only novices will sacrfice trust of a company if the email address is not visible, especially if all other contact information is readily available. The major advantage of a form is it gathers from the client the information required to authoritatively answer their question and solve ther problems.

Which is what a website does. Provides solutions to customer problems.

The era of nicely using simple forms for contact purposes has gone

The only reason a form gets hammered these days is if it's found to vulnerable. Sure, the days of using outdated formmail scripts that are vulnerable to injection should be over. If your form is secure, it's a valuable tool and much better than posting an email address that will, without a doubt, lead to a plethora of spam.