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Built on Spanglefish 3

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Spanglefish 3 Manual

Site Forms

You can build forms with a variety of fields in them which are then emailed to you. Add a new block to a page, choose Contact Form as the block type and a form like the one below will be added to the page. You can then move it up and down the page as required like any other block.

Enquiry Form

Customising your Form

By clicking the cog icon on the form block you can make a large number of changes to the form. You can add lots of form elements and choose which ones are required for instance. This way you can change it from a simple Contact Us form to a fairly complex form requiring lots of details.

What happens when the form is submitted?

When a visitor to your site fills the form in the form information is emailed to the email address you have specified. To set this address go to Site Settings -> Site Emails. You can also add a CC address so that the form is copied to another person in your organisation.

But... we have also added the functionality to set a specific form to send to a different address. Suppose you're a sports club with a general enquiries form. It sends to the site email. But imagine you want to create a separate 'become a member' form and have it be sent to the membership secretary. You can do that - edit the form's settings and you'll find you can enter a different email address for that form.

Spam Protection

The one massive problem with forms on websites is them being abused by automated spambots and human scammers. Billions of emails a day are generated by these. Whilst many will be stopped by the recipient's spam blocking systems, lots get through.

You'll be very familiar with Captcha system which in theory can't be solved by bots but can by humans. We don't use these - aside from being a real pain, they make life difficult in terms of accessibility. If you have eyesight issues, or a condition which prevents you easily using a mouse they can be a nightmare.

Instead we've developed our own tools to detect and block spam at source. They're not infallible, but so far are doing a pretty good job. You can make a small adjustment to how this works - if you're very worried about phishing attacks being sent through your forms you can adjust the settings to block any emails being sent which contain URLs in them.

ReplyTo Functionality

By default, any form on your site will generate an email to your chosen email address which will contain the following text along with the form submission.


DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL - it won't be received by anyone.

The emails come from the address noreply@web-cdn.org which is not monitored and if you reply, perhaps because you think you're replying to the person who made the enquiry, your reply won't be read by anyone.


However, that seems to be a shame - after all, most forms you might create on your website would ask for the enquirer's email address, so it would be a good idea if when you replied to an email from noreply@web-cdn.org that the reply would actually go to the person who made the enquiry instead.

Luckily, the folk who designed email in the first place thought of that. We can provide a 'replyTo' header to the email which tells your mail client to actually send the reply to the enquirer's email address, not to noreply@web-cdn.org.

So why don't you do that?

Well, unfortunately over the years we've learned that not all email clients treat the replyTo header in the way they should. Some*, (and I'm looking at you here, Samsung phones!) don't, so even if we send the mail with a replyTo address, if you use a Samsung phone the reply will go to noreply@web-cdn.org and get lost, even though you'll believe you've replied correctly to the enquirer. This is a worse situation than us having to tell you "Do not reply to this email" because you won't understand why you're not hearing back from your customer/enquirer.

Changing the default

If you are certain that neither you nor anyone else who responds to contact forms on your site has a Samsung phone, then you can change the default behaviour in Dashboard -> Site Settings -> Site Emails. If you do so the words "Do not reply to this email" won't be added to the emails you receive, and the replyTo address will be added as a header.

However, note that the replyTo address will only be added to the emails you receive if a field with the name 'email_address' or 'email' exists in the form, and the enquirer has filled it in with a valid email address. By default when you create a new form it will include the field 'email_address'.

* We do also get sporadic reports that sometimes AOL webmail doesn't respect the replyTo header either, so if you use AOL for your email you should take care when replying.

 

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