I’ve literally spent days trying to get two of my sites contact forms working.
I tested with another, it worked, so I thought I was good, took forever to get my second one to work, cause I’m not an expert coder so I thought it was me, it finally worked.
Go to put one on my third site, and both the second and third site I’ve gotten 6 hours of sleep every two days for a week+, staying up two days straight at a time, trying to find a script that works and to code it to work into my contact form, and it turns out all this time you guys were just ******** with me!!!
I was pushing trying to get my sites done so I can then look for work, to show my work, and you do this ****!
Seriously, if you guys are going to restrict PHP mail then JUST BAN IT’S USE!
Your making me think it was working, and then it doesn’t, thus all this time and STRESS waisted thinking it was me and/or the scripts I was trying to get working is just WRONG.
Yes, I’m well aware of that NOW… after I thought PHP Mail was working, CAUSE IT WAS…, but turns out it only works “sometimes” per what they’ve stated in that Article. But because it worked, I thought I was good, so as I said, they should just BAN its use, and this wouldn’t keep happening to people (per searching the knowledgebase/forum).
Now I have to figure out how to let go cause I like things perfect and job hunt instead, cause I don’t have anymore time to waste on this, to figure out how to use Gmail SMTP whatever. I’ll have to do that later… ugh!
BTW, I would like to point out that I spent a LOT of time also trying to find good Contact Forms that had either Captcha/Recap, or Security Question, and I was going to add a Honey Pot, etc., so as to prevent any issues for myself or InfinityFree.
Anyway, seriously though, just make PHP Mail up front then fully restricted so this doesn’t happen again.
Nevertheless, despite this, you guys provide an Amazing Free Service in features and allowances. There’s no better hoster out there it seems. So, I do appreciate that… this just hurt me bad, took a LOT out of me trying to get those forms working, they would, then they wouldn’t.
What tipped it off is I went back and tested the two forms I had working, and they were no longer working, so came to search, and guess what I found? You know it…
If it were up to me, PHP mail would be disabled entirely. Any time you would try to call the mail() function, you would see a big fat error saying that PHP mail on free hosting is not possible. In my opinion, having restrictions on a service is fine (especially free ones), as long as these restrictions are communicated clearly and honestly.
But it’s not up to me. Instead of completely banning it, iFastNet built in a whitelist where a few specific message formats would go through (mostly activation mails for popular CMS). And while there is definitely a point in that some email is better than no email, it’s very hard to deny that fact (along with the silent failure behavior) makes it really hard to communicate about this restriction.
I’m very sorry for the effort you had to go through to figure this out.
Thank you for the response, much appreciated, and I fully agree… though I do also agree that CMS’s they should allow to work etc. I would assume, but nothing else.
Another thing they could do is offer a really good but simple php mail script for free that clients can use, one that has:
A Challenge Question
ReCaptcha
HoneyPot
and whatever else which will make a secure and non-spammy etc. form, and this is the ONLY php mail contact form they are allowed to use for free accounts (other than the CMS’s of course).
This is then something they can sell to the public at large (being only free to free hosters), or offer for free to the public to get more business traffic, etc.
Marketing and all you know…
The making of a script like this is fairly simple as I’ve seen with the million free scripts I’ve looked at, it’s just no free ones exist that has ALL those elements in them.
Yep… When I get work again, I’ll try to figure all that out, start all over again, researching how that all works, massive Googling for a SMTP Contact form that I like and then that I can figure out how to get to work in my sites, etc. Ugh lol.
We could probably do that. We could even write it with SMTP support out of the box and provide a simple way to set all of that up.
We would just offer that for free as a service to everyone. We do already have an article about PHPMailer, but that still requires quite a bit of custom coding to get to work. A more plug and play contact form would be a lot easier.
Indeed… Also, you would want to make “two versions” (something that should be best practices but nobody does).
One is “Bare Bones” i.e. the ONLY Style formatting it has is to make certain functions work, like if there’s CSS needed to make a validation pop-up or text show etc., and the CSS is named specific to the form so it doesn’t potentially conflict with other CSS on the site. So, there’s no formatting for the form itself etc.
This is good for those who already have forms formated on their websites, they are already there in the Templates (there just is no backend), and then it becomes easy to add the form for those who aren’t coding experts which is most who would use free services.
Then a 2nd version is a fully formated/styled form for those who don’t have one, or would rather use it and they can just stick it on their site. Of course, make sure ALL the CSS is coded/named so it also won’t conflict with existing site code (another best practices thing developers of these scripts don’t do).
True, SMTP versions could be an option too. I don’t know all that’s involved with that yet, but ya, if it’s actually reliable and easy to setup, then sure.
