Form help, please

[Andy Asberry]

I have designed an animal registration form for a livestock
association. http://www.u-s-s-a.org/reg_app.htm

Our hosting company requests that we not use FP forms. They have a
Brand X they prefer. It is a simple request-for-info form and
therefore won't work for us.

They say that if we use the FP form and the server is swamped with
spam, they will have to remove it.

There are many mandatory fields including email. I feel pretty safe
with it but would like advice from those more experienced than me. Is
there a better method?

Thanks.

 

[TC]

Sounds like a lot of sheep shit to me. nothingwrong with what you are doing.
How do they figure you will get inundated with Spam?

 

[Andrew Murray]

I don't know that any other form handler is safer from attracting spam than
the FP form handler. Just use the script your host offers if they offer any
(in leiu of not using the Frontpage extensions). Forms are not "Frontpage
forms" they are HTML forms.

Many server side scripts have the email address within the script - not in
the html page, therefore it is not visible to spam bots when crawling a web
page.

Depending on your server Linux or Windows, a script like the Sendmail
(whatever it's called) one on Matt's Script Archive, or any one of numerous
others, such as this at http://www.form2email.net/ - stops spammers using
the form too. Requires Unix/Linux server with CGI-BIN access for running
scripts.

 

[Chris Leeds, MVP-FrontPage]

FWIW;
The "swamped with spam" thing is probably because FrontPage forms that
submit to email addresses actually expose the address in the code of the
page in the form bot tag.

Had a guy in a jamb with his FrontPage forms because he insisted on FTP-ing
them up.
found and used a tool from www.cluxa.com as it was easier than writing
custom form handlers for all his different forms.
worked good, was real easy, and the actual "form handler" is residing on my
server not his (so he can't mess it up, etc.)

--
Chris Leeds,
Microsoft MVP-FrontPage

If you make web sites for other people, you should check out ContentSeed:
http://contentseed.com/
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