Email Forms and Spam Problems

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I had a recent problem with spam on an email form I had set up for a client. They were literally getting hundreds of messages a day through the form. It was pretty bad. Unfortunately I wasn’t hosting the site so I didn’t have the ability to use spam controls in the email configuration. So, what else could I do? What a mess.

Well, I finally found a fairly easy PHP form to use on the site. What I like about this one is that adding additional fields is simple and the form will automatically require and expect something in each field, without any major scripting to do. It has captcha security that requires the input of a security code to submit the form - a great spam buster!

After spending most of a day trying to get a different PHP form to accept one extra field (I almost had it but it wasn’t sending the info to the site owner in an email so was virtually useless), I was thrilled to find this one, which was developed specifically for beginning web designers and those who are NOT programmers.

A special word of thanks goes out to the developer, Scott, who helped fix a problem with apostrophes being interpreted as slashes in a text message field. What a unique find - a developer who actually takes time to improve and troubleshoot his script! Check it out at http://www.myphpscripts.net/dlman/.

Scott is the BEST!!!

10 Things That A Web Developer Should Always Do For The Client

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A “Best Practices” article from Web Standards Group, written by Peter Firminger (23-July-2005), provides a To Do list of basic standards of practice for web developers. Below is the short edited list. The complete article with explanations and links to other resources can be found at http://webstandardsgroup.org/resources/bestpractice.cfm

Basic Rules …

  1. Help them by getting it right from the start.
  2. You’re the expert so you should know about and be doing this stuff.
  3. Don’t wait until they ask for things that should already have been done correctly.

Specifically, 10 Things …

  1. Make and set up a 404 error page (and any other likely error messages).
  2. Install a favicon.
  3. Install a robots.txt file - see http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html.
  4. When setting up the DNS, check for errors at http://dnsreport.com/.
  5. Set up the email server correctly.
  6. Domain forwarding and email addresses.
    • Advise clients that forwarding the domain to free ISP web is very unprofessional.
    • Businesses should never use hotmail, yahoo or excite email addresses.
  7. Metadata
    • Make sure all your metadata is in place
    • Where required, use unique metadata.
    • Start with a base template for every site and minimally include:
      - a valid doctype
      - charset
      - basic metadata tags
    • You can set the default template in Dreamweaver
    • Don’t litter the metadata with your own stuff, i.e., “site by YOU.”
    • If it’s an error page or some other page that you don’t want indexed, change the robots metadata to <meta name="Robots" content="noindex, follow">
  8. Validate the whole site with the WDG validator - http://www.htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.cgi.
  9. Document your code if appropriate, at least indent it clearly – you may not be the next person to edit the site.
  10. Statistics – if the host doesn’t give you analysis of the logs, find one that does!

    11. Source: http://webstandardsgroup.org/resources/bestpractice.cfm