I received a call from a client a few days ago. She was somewhat panicked because she was receiving unreadable emails from the contact form on her website. She was afraid that potential clients were filling out the contact form and the information was somehow being scrambled into random characters which made it impossible to follow up with these contacts or know other information about them.
The first thing I did was check out the form and direct it to send some tests to my email address. I was unable to get the same results as the client was getting. This was good as it meant that the form was functioning normally. So what was the problem then?
The answer was google or some other search engine bot was filling out the form while indexing the site. Search engine bots are automated programs that come to your site to index it, that’s how you appear in search results on google and such. So it is not a bad thing at all. When a bot comes across a form it fills the form with random information and submits it just to see what content lies on the other side.
That being said the useless emails that you may be getting from contact forms can get annoying. Your webmaster should be able to configure your forms to only send valid emails.
If you maintain your own site you can find and install tools that take care of this issue as well. WordPress typically comes with tools to aid with this or you can download a captcha tool to help.
You have probably been to sites before where you filled out a form and had to input the characters from an image before submitting. This is known as a captcha security image. If you want to know what a captcha does, bots cannot read images so they will not be able to enter the same characters that are contained in the image and prevents the form from processing the information entered.
recaptcha example
A good captcha library to use is recaptcha which can be downloaded for free from http://recaptcha.net/.
Comments for all Websites
Friday, September 25th, 2009Google has just released a plug-in for the FireFox and Internet Explorer browsers called SideWiki. For those of you that are not familiar with the term wiki, it refers to a system in which a community creates the content and comments etc. An example of a Wiki would be Wikipedia.
Anyway, back to the original point, SideWiki allows anyone with the plug-in to make comments about any site that they visit. These comments would then be visible to anyone else who visits the site with the SideWiki plug-in installed.
Some are saying that this is a great idea others are not so sure. If you are one of the ones thinking its not a good idea. You may be saying “If I wanted visitors to leave comments I would have made a forum or blog etc.”
The commenting may be out of your control but think of the positive. It could give you insight into your site and how to improve it. Download the plug-in yourself so you can see the comments. If you are getting negative comments about a certain area or feature of your site you can work to change that area to make it more appealing. They may even leave comments relating to how it can be better.
The other side of the coin is that you can see what areas of the website people are leaving positive comments about. So you could turn it into a positive in which it could act as free user testing if enough people are commenting.
Tags: comments, google, plug-in, SideWiki
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