Simple Basic Contact Form – The Winner

 Tech  Comments Off on Simple Basic Contact Form – The Winner
Jun 082023
 

The winner of the contact form test comparisons is “Simple Basic Contact Form” by WPKube. I’ve had it running now for the past 3 years or so and it is simply the best. Easy to set up and administer and the emailed form contents are nicely formatted and includes the IP address, host and browser info as I wanted.

What really sets it apart is the Antispam measure which is unique: you can enable and create your own unique challenge question! Then you input what the correct response should be and whether it needs to be case sensitive. No need for Google’s CAPTCHA (though the option is there) and you can change your question if need be. If you look at my contact form you’ll see my simple question: Well anyone past 5th grade should know the answer to that one so I expect any adult who can read English to be able to answer that.

But-the best part is that the bots cannot! In the past 3 years not a single bot has gotten past my challenge.

I’ve seen about 3 human generated spam comments during this  entire time and thousands of bot scripts visiting the site and totally failing.

That is impressive.

So, a big kudos to WPKube and if you need a simple contact form then this is your answer. Thanks guys!

Formidable Forms test

 Tech  Comments Off on Formidable Forms test
Sep 092019
 

Recap: the purpose of the form testing trials is to determine which free version form meets the following criteria:

  1.  Easy to set up the basic form with 1 Name field, Email, Subject and Message fields and a Submit button, nothing more.
  2.  Easy to customize basic styling and sizing of fields.
  3.  Has anti-bot measures in place so don’t have to use Google’s Re-Captcha.

The reason for free forms only is because a simple form to send a message is all that most of us really need. If the above criteria are met then it’s a go!

Today, I have updated the Contact Page with a trial run of Formidable forms free version. Set up was easy with the templates available, had to remove Last Name field and just use one field for the name. Set a checkbox to send IP address and browser info of submitter which I appreciate.

Pros: Easy to set up form from template.
Can set it to send IP address and browser info of submitter.
Uses existing site styling to make simple, clean appearance.
Contents of form submission are very nicely formatted in the email sent.

Cons: Cannot edit the style of the Submit button text which is too faint-all I wanted to do is make the text bold, but it seems to be impossible.
No provision to set a honey trap for bots? Perhaps it is already built in I don’t know.
Styling input boxes for form fields are undecipherable and confusing and none for the Submit button there, either.

Now let’s wait and see how it fares against the bots.

WPForms review with some new tricks

 Tech  Comments Off on WPForms review with some new tricks
May 282019
 

Just finished setting up a WPForms created Contact page to test out. It looks good and I like better how I can lay out my checkboxes inline instead of just in a column as I had to do with using the Formidable forms plugin. I also prefer the shortened Name, Email and Subject field text boxes. I also really like the user interface for setting up the form. Intuitive and friendly. The form submission works well and I like the way the confirmation message appears afterwards, especially after I turned off the scroll to message option which was on by default.

On the down side with WPForms is that it does not provide the submitter’s IP Address and User-Agent (Browser/OS) info like Formidable Forms does. I also like the formatting of the email message by Formidable much better. I had to resort to changing my messages to plain text in WPForms and it still doesn’t even compare, oh well. It would be simple enough to improve though.

There is a bug with WPForms as well. If you enable the cc email option and add an address there AND put two or more comma separated addresses  in the primary field slot then the cc’d address gets multiple mailings per each address in the primary field slot… It seems the form sends each message separately per each address listed. That’s poor form I’d say, lol.

As for the tricks, well that’s for the bots to find out 🙂

Are you Happy checkboxes

 Tech  Comments Off on Are you Happy checkboxes
Mar 012019
 


Just trying out adding checkboxes to my Contact form. Will update with results and statistics on how people answer…

 Posted by at 3:31 am

Learning Suffusion

 Tech  Comments Off on Learning Suffusion
Mar 092013
 

I'm learning how to customize the Suffusion theme. The theme is full featured which is good, but setting up the main menu navigation was entirely unintuitive. I think it should be installed and active by default. The demo video posted on the help forum saved me, but is quite out of date.