I have a few simple sites that I have on a multi-site account from Have Host. They all have some kind of a contact form with which I use the application “Forms to Go” to set up the .php script that I than use the action “Upload Stuff” to send the script to the server. All of the sites’ contact pages are working properly except one and I can’t figure out why.
I am not a web designer by trade and the sites are for myself and friends so I am only infrequently into Freeway. So I usually go back to a site that I know is working properly and check to remember how I did something and than carry that info into a new site that I may be working on. So for this problem I can find no difference in the way the form is being processed with Forms to Go and uploaded to the server. I’ve got a feeling I’m missing something small, but I’m going crazy trying to find it.
If anyone can offer any insights I would deeply appreciate it. The site in question is <www.59picas.com>. Freeway Pro 5.4.3. and the latest version of Forms to Go.
Personally I find Tim’s PHP Feedback form excellent. It can all be done within FW - no uploading of separate files AND the same form can be copied and pasted into multiple sites so you don’t need to redo the form every time - apart from minor tweaks.
the most problems in these cases I recognized either as DeltaD said by “wrong place” or wrong path. It might be that you copied the old path from former doc?
One thing to forms2go what I use too. If you may navigate to this form:
just leave it blank and hit “senden”, you may recognize “error messages”.
I think this is pretty helpful for the validation-fields in order to support form-users and to navigate them safe and secure through a proper form-process.
I also added as a validation the drop-down list.
Is it too naive to say:
By inserting something like that (you need to choose a certain value), it makes machines harder to automatic fill out a form to prevent spam?
Sadly, no. What does make it more difficult is a honeypot test, which
Tim Plumb has made quick and easy in PHP Feedback Form. I don’t know
if FTG has this feature, but it’s a good one! (A honeypot is a field
in the form that is invisible to humans, but looks like something that
should be filled in to a 'bot. Your form handler looks to see if that
field was completed, and if it is, it bounces the form submission
completely. Since humans can’t see it, they don’t fill it in.)
Another alternative is a CAPTCHA of one sort or another. I have seen
stats that prove that a CAPTCHA that never changes between requests –
just a simple image with a question in it to be answered in a form
field – will knock an impressive amount of spam out of the park
without any investment in fancy image-generation and distortion
applications.
But all of this gets trumped by the “room full of poorly-paid browser
zombies”; people who are paid a pittance to sit there and attack forms
all day with come-ons for one or another get-rich-quick scheme.
Walter
On Dec 14, 2010, at 2:19 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:
By inserting something like that (you need to choose a certain
value), it makes machines harder to automatic fill out a form to
prevent spam?
Honeypot looks promising and could be done if I know how to create hidden formfields. The rest would be done in FTG and its validation parameters for example:
Blank Formfield, validation 0 to 0 characters (or something like that).
I suspect maybe so. You’d have to try it and see. I don’t know
anything about FTG’s validators.
To make a hidden field, use the Page / Form Setup dialog, click on the
Hidden Fields tab, and then press new. Give it an innocuous-sounding
name, like customer_id or something like that.
Also, you might want to experiment with making a regular text field,
then moving it above the top of the page in Freeway (onto the
pasteboard). This will cause it to be hidden from any visual browser,
but will appear to be a normal input field (I imagine that a bot,
since it reads the source code in order to figure out what the
fieldnames are that it should post, would notice if you were using a
hidden field) and thus would appear to be fair game for any automated
submission.
Walter
On Dec 14, 2010, at 11:32 AM, Thomas Kimmich wrote:
Blank Formfield, validation 0 to 0 characters (or something like
that).