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https://adamjones.me/blog/dont-use-contact-forms/
Contact forms are almost always worse for users than just putting an email on your website. I explore why they're terrible, why you've done it anyway, and what to do about it.
Why your contact form sucks
Your contact form is completely broken
It's remarkable how many contact forms are just straight-up broken. A WordPress upgrade here, a change to your CRM there, and your contact form silently breaks.
At time of writing, B&Q's contact form just plainly doesn't work1. I am fairly amazed that a retailer with revenues in the billions doesn't notice written queries have stopped coming in.
[...] Contact forms are hard to get right, and often just a worse experience for everyone involved. Go forth and remove your contact form and list your email on your website now!
[Ed. comment: click through and read the lengthy, but hard to argue against, complaints about web-based contact forms]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by datapharmer on Thursday May 09 2024, @02:54PM (5 children)
Yeah I don't buy that. You can take a contact form down, but once that email address is out there you are getting spammed for life. Dumping your email on a website will absolutely get you spammed to death. I have lots of anecdotal experience with this, and saying "the spam filtering will handle it" is just making it the poor mail system administrator's headache to manage the filtering instead of the website's.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by zocalo on Thursday May 09 2024, @04:20PM
We're not talking major web properties here, but I've had emails out there with only simple JavaScript (back in the day) and CSS (more recently) obfuscation almost since it was first possible to do so in some cases, and have never had a spam problem with any of them. The spamtrap emails in plain ASCII in the same HTML files, but not on the page the viewer sees, generate spam source IPs by the bucket load though...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday May 09 2024, @05:01PM
I like getting spam on public emails. It's effortless way to get plenty of interesting funny code in my hands to analyze.
(Some desperate people use this spell for just calling money, though.)
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Thursday May 09 2024, @07:02PM
That's why I have a junk email address. 20 years ago I got tired of arguing and making up eff@u.com and just make a gmail account for nothing but this crap. I get maybe 20 messages a day on it, I read maybe 2 a week. My real email gets 4-5 messages a week and I read most of them.
Of course I'm against DEI. Donald, Eric, and Ivanka.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ls671 on Thursday May 09 2024, @07:22PM
Contact forms used to be and do what you say back in the days when most people didn't use spam filters. Nowadays, you will get spammed for life with your contact forms; you will get way more spam reaching you through your contact form than from traditional emails. Just be creative in creating contact emails you need to use like say, contact2376@domain, etc. and simply forward that to your regular email you don't want disclosed on the web site.
I kind of agree with TFA, nowadays it seems better to just refer users to an email address, much easier to filter out and identify spam that way.
I host many websites with contact forms so I have up to date experience with it. Also, the websites might be blocked for sending too much spam through the contact forms since most users have gmail accounts or what not.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Friday May 10 2024, @06:11PM
Since I sometimes write to mailing lists, I'm getting "spammed for life", as you say, since 20+ years. At the moment, with spam filter, the signal is still stronger than the noise and holding steady.
Anyway, you can just have throw-away email addresses for contact, like helpdesk86@example.com and change it once you start getting lots of spam. Done.