Forms

[Miluette]

I finally found a free site that generates an actual email submission form for you. Yay! It's this one: http://www.tele-pro.co.uk/scripts/contact_form/

It worked when I tested it on the site. However, when I put it in this page, suddenly it doesn't work anymore. It gives me the not-sent error every time, and I have no clue why. Boooo!

I hope it doesn't have anything to do with the way email-stuff's set up on the server. I thought this was pretty simple...

[Xepher]

You can't cheat with the "From" address. You had it set to just "LF" which isn't a valid email. You need to use an actual email you can receive bounces at. I changed it to your @xepher.net email address and it works fine.

[Miluette]

Ohhh. Wow. Hmm, but it worked when I used that pair of letters on the demo website to test it. Which doesn't make sense. The site didn't explain things very well (or, well, anything), so I wasn't actually sure what the "from" address was for...like the dummy I am, lol.

[Xepher]

Yeah, but the dummy site probably doesn't actually have a secure email server that demands properly formatted mail. :-)

[Miluette]

Oh my. I'm testing it again and the forms get emailed to me blank. D: I think everything code-related hates me today, lol.

[Xepher]

I think I fixed it for you. You can't have "enctype="text/plain" in the form, because that can't handle textareas IIRC. Either way, taking that out made it work. I may have slightly screwed up your pretty formatting in the process of troubleshooting though, but just in the "form" section of commish.php.

[Miluette]

Ah yes, it works! We are the form masters now. Thank you. XD

[Miluette]

Oh man, my Cutenews forms get a lot of spam now.

Apparently CN isn't all that secure or anything, but it's lightweight and I like that. It's pretty much just as I like it now, except for all the spam.

I looked on its forums and the best solution so far is to make it so no one can post URLs in the comments. (Edit: well, actually, it screws up a lot of things, so I just took it back out. :x) However, I don't exactly want to disallow that, like if someone was to mention theirs or another site in passing. What I WOULD like is a really lightweight captcha, like those little ones that ask you "what is 2 + 5?" or really compact image validation. I should probably have some kind of anti-spam protection for all the other forms on my sites now, too.

Edit: All right, I found some ways to negate spam in my non-news forms by adding css-hidden fields that are only valid if empty, so if the spambots fill those in it'll be like - DENIED! (I don't feel like digging around in Cutenews's code though :x)

But how does everyone else do it~? And is this a decent method.

[griever]

What about something like this?  http://recaptcha.net/  I've seen it used on other sites, some fairly large, and it seems pretty good.

[Miluette]

Yeah, I was about to do that (even signed up and got the key), but it looks kind of big and obnoxious. I don't have many commenters yet, and people are lazy sometimes; they may actually flinch away on sighting a captcha like that.

'Course they may also go away after seeing pages of spam. c_c; Oh, such a delicate balance~

I'll probably end up going with that.

[Databits]

Don't bother... you can draw right? Draw like 3 images and have a radio button question that says to select the image like X. Then on the back end if it's not the one selected just don't send the email.

[Miluette]

Ohhh... that's a good idea, too. XD

Someone just suggested I make an answer box like "is fire hot or cold?" so you'd have to type "yes," but actually this picture selection idea amuses me more. Although there's still a 1:3 chance the spam could still be posted.

Some of my spam looks like people posting on proxies, but I'm not too sure how all different forms of spam work anyway.

[Databits]

there's a lot of interesting stuff you can do to help prevent spam, the picture idea one was a simple one that will filter out pretty much every spam bot. Others are things like math questions, or that stupid little mixed image entry thing (which is easy to get around now).

[Miluette]

I found out what was wrong with the first spam prevention thing I tried, so now I have it set up to block anything that includes "http:" in the comments, since almost all the spam did. And so far, it works! The only spam I got today was a random generic, horribly typoed "great site!" kind of message from an obviously Russian spammer. I don't get spam like that. I mean, what is the point?! And you know they aren't being sincere.

[Miluette]

Oh my.

Suddenly, all my forms, which were working fine before, are not working. I wonder why. I know they were definitely working, like, last week...