Unblocking Contact Forms

Websites with CAPTCHA on their contact form are blocking feedback.

Manually-submitted spam is not blocked. These spammers are humans with an incentive and they'll do whatever dance your CAPTCHA requires to push their spam at you.

But some kind-hearted people who have a valuable observation to share — or who wish to clarify something before buying a product — will not have enough personal incentive to do that dance.

Tapping the "Back" or "Bookmarks" icon is easier than doing the CAPTCHA dance. Viewing a video at a different website — or reading a story there, or buying something — is a lot more fun than fighting with a contact block that the site owner intentionally put in place.

Sometimes I wonder why certain site owners bother to put up a contact form at all. They open themselves to spam and close themselves to honest feedback.

On this very subject, Grace Judson provides an amalgamation of an email conversation we had in her Do you welcome feedback? blog post. Within the introduction, she says, "… being open to feedback of all sorts, while it may sometimes be frustrating and even painful, will ultimately enrich our lives."

As for myself, I like feedback, all kinds of feedback, as you'll find out in the post linked to above. (You'll also find out why.)

In conjunction with that, as the tone of this article has been suggesting, I don't like spam and I don't like CAPTCHA.

I am lucky, however, that I have the skills to make software that effectively does something about it without also inconveniencing form users.

We get very little spam through our contact forms — even though our forms do not now have, and never in 20 years have had, any kind of visual CAPTCHA. Never was a form user required to suffer extra inconvenience to submit a contact or feedback form.

It is possible to (1) reduce spam to a tiny trickle and (2) get rid of CAPCHA once and for all.

You don't have to choose one or the other. Claim both!

The secret?

The "secret" is the existence of software developed during two decades of monitoring automated spamming attempts.

Experience the bliss. Unblock your contact forms without sacrificing your protection from automated spam.

Choose one of several available methods and implement your choice. (Two of the choices are paid and two are free.)

1. (Paid) Master Form .PHP — This is PHP software you install on your website.

   This software and Master Form V4 (which you'll read about next on the list) are both excellent automated-spam blockers. Automated spam just doesn't get through. There is the occasional manually-submitted spam, but no automatically submitted spam issues have come to my attention for years and years.

2. (Paid) Master Form V4 — This is Perl CGI software you install on your website.

   Like the Master Form .PHP software, Master Form V4 is an excellent automated-spam blocker. It just doesn't happen.

3. (Free) Willmaster Feedback — This is PHP software you install on your website.

   Willmaster Feedback is a simple form handler without some of the above paid software features. But it does a good job blocking automatically submitted spam.

4. (Free) Spam‑free Form — This is the easiest to use and a serious automated-spam blocker. It's likely to be the best there is, and remain so. Further, it's free.

   It is a service with a passworded dashboard where you create your forms. To publish a form, you either paste in a line of JavaScript or you use the WordPress plugin.

   What your form user types into your form is sent directly to you by email. The information is never stored on the Spam‑free Form server. Nor do we set cookies on your form users. Further, we don't track your form users. (No GDPR issues.)

The website owner's ideal state of (1) CAPTCHA-free forms and (2) zero automatically submitted spam is reachable — with any one of the above-listed methods.

The last on the list, the free Spam‑free Form service, has an upgrade in development designed to eliminate much (perhaps all) manually-submitted spam.

With automatically submitted spam already a thing of the past, the new blocking of manually-submitted spam may result in an experience completely free of form spam.

Will you miss the spam? No, of course not. That was a rhetorical question.

Do you want to get rid of the spam and, also, get rid of CAPTCHA blocks that keep your forms from being used legitimately? Yes, of course.

Choose a method from the above list and just do it. Get in touch if you need help.

(This article first appeared with an issue of the Possibilities newsletter.)

Will Bontrager