Adding Contact Form for Blog
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How do I add a Contact form to my blog that will present a Capcha to defeat automatically generated spam, while at the same time allowing people who read the blog to reach out to me by email?
One of my frustrations in the past – as a reader of other peoples’ WordPress blogs – has been a lack of any clear way to contact the person. A typical use case would be a nutrition or exercise blog, where you want to hire the person to consult for you. I have sometimes wasted 30 minutes trying to figure out the person’s contact information by cross referencing their blog to Google searches.
Honestly, if WordPress wants to forbid email contacts then at very least it should support some kind of public Contact form where people can leave Contact messages in a discussion format.
Seems ridiculously silly to not directly support private contacts.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi,
You can add a contact form, but not with captcha. This support document explains how to add one:
Askimet is built into WordPress.com sites as a way to catch SPAM.
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@poetrydude66
This is a sincere question. Given the that you registered 5 days ago, created 14 support threads, and you appear to be very unhappy with the limitations of blogging here at WordPress.COM, and feel your aren’t getting the support you need by posting to the peer support forum and reading the support docs, are you sure you want to remain here? I’m thinking that WordPress.ORG may be a better fit for you.Please read this comparison: WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org
WordPress.com and WordPress.org are completely separate. WordPress.com and WordPress.org have different log-ins and run different versions of themes with same names. If you don’t have a username account at WordPress.ORG click http://wordpress.org/support/ and register one on the top right hand corner of the page that opens, so you can post to the support forums there and receive advice from WordPress.ORG bloggers.
If you choose to move your content you need to create an XML export file of it. That file will not include the theme as they cannot be exported. See 3 below.
1. Hire a web host http://wordpress.org/hosting/
2. Set up a WordPress.org install and equip it with a theme and plugins.
http://wordpress.org/themes/
http://wordpress.org/plugins/3. Export your content out of your WordPress.com blog http://en.support.wordpress.com/export/ and import it into the install.
4. Purchase a site redirect upgrade from wordpress.com
http://en.support.wordpress.com/site-redirect/ or if you have domain mapping then update the nameservers http://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/domain-management/5. Transfer subscribers and stats. See http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/moving-your-subscribers/
6. Set your wordpress.com blog visibility to private. To change blog visibility to private go to > Settings > Reading scroll to Blog Visibility and choose option 3 . See the guide here http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/
Alternatively you can purchase a Guided Transfer and Staff will do the move and set up for you http://en.support.wordpress.com/guided-transfer/
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Your question about creating a contact form has already been answered.
Seems ridiculously silly to not directly support private contacts
The decision to provide visitors with a contact form or not is up to the site owner. Not everyone wants one. The option is available if they do. And if they do, it all is filtered through Akismet.
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timethief, I like wordpress.com. Nothing I’ve said justifies the kind of post you wrote. How do I learn about something I know nothing about if I am too shy to just ask questions about it?
I’m running a small blog, not a commercial venture. I don’t need the added hassle of self-support running my own web server software and doing administration for all parts of the service.
Jennifer, I guess I was wondering why they don’t support some default Contact forms as simple checkboxes on the Dashboard. The reason 90% of blogs don’t support the feature is because 90% are probably just going through Dashboard options and not bothering to explore further. The only documentation linked in this thread is how to add a Contact Us form to each individual Post or Page. No one would do that much work to support a Contact feature. They would want to create a parent link that is a peer to About from every page of the site.
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Thanks mar1965 for that link. The problem with that page – and the reason I posted this question after reading that page – is that post explains how to recreate a Contact Us form on every individual Post or Page of your site. That would be just a crazy amount of work. No one would do that would they?
What I was trying to support was a form that is a peer to About on every page of the web site, and that one Contact form would be available in any context. I implement one form one time and every page of my site gets to re-use that. Isn’t that the way a Contact Us form is done on the vast majority of Internet sites that have one?
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Do like I do – one contact form on one Page – that form is then linked to several times at different places on my site – simple clean – code once reference many times
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auxclass, I did as you suggested. The help file in support is discussing a use-case that I think would be very rare (creating a different contact us page for each page or post). I did as you suggested and named the page Contact and then created custom menu for site to link to that page.
It’s such a basic feature that I think they should make that a checkbox in Dashboard. My guess is many users would want that there and just don’t want to invest the 30 minutes into figuring out how to do that from custom menus and embedded forms.
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You are welcome to suggest it in the Ideas forum.
I can’t imagine why any site owner would need/want more than one (maybe two, depending on where they want the feedback email sent to) contact forms on their website. It’s not a comment feature. Every Post and Page already has the comment box enabled.
Contact forms generate a private email to your registered email address and show up in your dashboard under Feedback>Feedback, but it is not publicly displayed.
Comment forms can generate a private email and show up in your dashboard under Comments. If the site owner chooses to do so under Settings>Discussion, comments can be displayed on your site.
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Jennifer, most of what you say agrees with what I said above. I also agree it makes no sense to put a Contact form on Posts or random Pages. That’s why I was confused by the Contact Form help page which near the top says “You can add contact forms to both posts and pages.”
Like you, I agree it makes no sense to do so, at least not in the context that the WordPress help file presents it.
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But many people wish to do things which make no sense. All we do is tell them that it is indeed possible.
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After implementing a Contact form, I tested it by sending a message to myself. It shows up as email, and it separately shows up in the Dashboard section Feedback. What I am noticing however is that the list of Feedbacks does NOT contain a way to see those Feedbacks that were marked as spam. How would I view Feedbacks being filtered out as spam?
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Spam feedback’s are never deleted by your blog – deleted only by you – there is a spam filter when there is spam in it
https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/bulk-delete-85000-spam-feedback-submissions?replies=8
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With Comments, there is a nice class selection at the top of the Comments menu in Dashboard that lets you select from Spam, Approved, or Trash. I see no such class selection available under Feedback | Feedback. Where will the spam show up on this user interface?
The link you provided suggests that I will get tens of THOUSANDS of spam messages, and that there is no user interface to delete these. That’s so horrible I would like to ask does any third party vendor sell a service to provide a Contact form together with a Capcha to filter out the spammers? Until WordPress rethinks this feature, I would be willing to pay money to save myself some time. Do I have any third party options?
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I had 15 spam contacts on my site in 6 months – those blogs were some sort of special case, no idea why, I checked two other sites that I Admin and there were NO spam contacts in over a year –
I see no such class selection available under Feedback | Feedback. Where will the spam show up on this user interface?
Send yourself a spam comment, the folder only shows if there is spam in it
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When you get spam feedback, and believe me at some point you will, or delete feedback, there will be a couple of additional links at the top of the feedback dashboard.
There is no way to add Captchas to WordPress.com blogs.
There is no reason to “rethink” this feature, as you’ve put it. Like comments, all feedback is filtered through Akismet’s spam filters.
If the features on WordPress.com are not to your liking or you would be like to be able to do more with WordPress’ features, including adding Captchas, then I’d like to suggest to you to find a good webhost and set up the WordPress software.
Here’s a little more about the differences between WordPress.com and the standalone version of WordPress:
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If there are users who have 10K+ spam emails and no way to delete them, at very least rethinking this feature would give them a way to delete all of the spam messages at once.
Isn’t there a way to have a page on a WordPress blog be a 301 redirect to another web site? I’ve never seen any site (Tumblr, Wix, etc) that didn’t offer such a feature.
If WordPress offered a redirect, then you could have your Contact page simply redirect to a different web site that implemented Contact with the capcha.
And it doesn’t follow from the fact that I want a capcha code that I don’t like WordPress. Everything involves tradeoffs. Nothing is perfect.
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The ability to delete all spam messages at once already exists. It’s the “Empty Spam” button. Or just wait 30 days and it will automatically be deleted from the system.
If you want to host your contact form somewhere else, then just create a link to it on your site.
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Is there any way to setup a 301 redirect? If not, how would you ever migrate your site off WordPress and preserve any SEO you might have for the WordPress site?
301 redirect would let you for example have any incoming request for:
mysite.wordpress.com/contact
be redirected to:
http://www.somenewsite.com/contact
together with a 301 code returned by the web server to the client (301 indicating that this is a permanent redirection).
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