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0 pointsforesto1y ago0 comments

More often than not, the contact forms that I encounter impose one or more hassles on the visitor:

Please enable JavaScript. Please allow scripts from these off-site domains to execute on your computer. Please enter a return address hosted by an approved email provider. Please read through all the categories in this drop-down list and select the one that best fits your message. Please fill in these required fields and re-submit the form. Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com. Please waste your time repeatedly solving annoying puzzles, until our CAPTCHA provider can sufficiently fingerprint you and your browser. Please re-type the text you already entered, because we reset some or all of the form fields due to one of the above complaints.

No thanks. If I'm at a contact page, it is most likely because I have something of value to the site owner, such as potential business or knowledge of something broken on their site. If they expect me to jump through hoops, I won't bother.

In principle, contact forms could be nice enough, just as many web sites could be clear, simple, quick-loading, static pages. In practice, they're generally a burden.

Given that they don't offer much to the visitor even in the best case, I would rather just see an email address.

0 comments

makeitdouble1y ago

Yes! It's a plague that's hurting most generic content submissions services.

Most Saas in that area can't see the difference between a freelance portfolio site where you can send work offers and the support form of your local telecom where people will send death threats.

At the end of the day, for the lambda user it's just better to have the forms handled on the same platform as the site (wix, squarespace etc.) than dealing with a generic solution elsewhere.

> email address

On the receiving end, the advantage of the contact form is to map it to something else that email (Google Sheets etc.). Of course you can set an automated email box that will process the incoming mail into something else, but that's just an additional burden.

immibis1y ago

These hurdles only exist for the 0.0001% of people who deliberately hampered their own web experience in an attempt to reduce ads or tracking.

forestoOP1y ago

I gave eight examples (which themselves are an incomplete list). Nitpicking at two of them while ignoring the rest, and projecting fault onto people who experience them, doesn't refute the overall point.

This is worth a read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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