Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 19 submissions in the queue.
posted by hubie on Thursday May 09 2024, @02:26PM   Printer-friendly

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]


Original Submission

 
This discussion was created by hubie (1068) for logged-in users only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ls671 on Thursday May 09 2024, @07:22PM

    by ls671 (891) on Thursday May 09 2024, @07:22PM (#1356365) Homepage

    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.

    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.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Informative=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3