Here is a very important message to anyone contemplating using a contact form on their website instead of simply providing an email address:
DON'T FUCKING BOTHER. BECAUSE WEB CONTACT FORMS ARE FUCKING SHITE.
Why are they fucking shite? Because they DON'T FUCKING WORK. At least nine times out of ten they don't. They are utterly sodding useless.
And what is even worse, they do not fucking work even when they claim they have. They say "Thank you for your message" or whatever, and then just drop it on the fucking floor and no bugger ever receives it. Not working in the first place is bad enough, but lying about it as well sucks syphilitic elephants' cocks and drinks their come.
(Sometimes it is obvious that the confirmation message is bollocks; if it is simply some javascript that pops it up when it receives an onsubmit event, the confirmation message will appear instantly and if that happens you can pretty much guarantee that it is bollocks. But sometimes you get one which is on a new page and even quotes your message to show it has made it to the server, yet still goes on to drop the fucker on the floor. The only confirmations which can be considered trustworthy are those which send an email confirmation quoting your message - but still not always, and they are vanishingly rare in any case.)
Sometimes it is possible to identify a specific reason why they don't work. Usually it isn't, though, and even when it is it is NEVER a good reason but ALWAYS some variation on "this contact form was coded by a stupid bastard who had no idea what he was fucking doing and should never have been let near a computer in the first place and should also give back whatever they paid him for doing it because he's done such a shit job he has no right to keep it and if he refuses then they ought to sue the cunt". Some of these reasons are listed below, though be aware that the list is not exhaustive...
The form does not work because cookies are not enabled, though it does not tell you this. Fucksake. Of course cookies are not enabled. Why the pissing fuck should they be? Just because the twats who write browsers set them to "enabled" by default? Fuck that. Anyone with half a grain of sense immediately disables cookies as soon as they fire up a newly-installed browser. And anyone with half a grain of sense who is coding a website will realise that and make sure the fucking site works without them. Which is very easy because apart from actually logging in to something there is fuck all that needs them anyway. In particular there is not a blind bugger of a smidgeon of a trace of a valid reason to require cookies to work just to submit a fucking form. Indeed it takes a deliberate action to specifically check the fucking cookies and respond by making the form not work. If your form does not work without cookies it is because you have put some effort into making it that way on purpose, and therefore you are a huge massive twat and deserve to be force-fed actual biscuit cookies mashed up in komodo dragon spit until you fucking burst, like Mr Creosote only without enjoying the meal first.
The form does not work because of some shite-arsed javascript failing. Again this comes down to "a stupid cunt has deliberately taken the time to make it not work when it otherwise would have worked fine". You do NOT need fucking javascript to submit a fucking form any more than you need fucking cookies. And you do NOT assume your fucking javascript is going to work. If you include "serious" functionality in the same .js as some fucking arse-leakage to do with advertising or tagging or tracking or any of that kind of fucking shite then the fucking script will be fucking blocked. If your script assumes that specific items of browser functionality, such as cookies or local storage objects, are available, and does not have the sense to realise that anyone with any nous will have made sure they are not, then it won't fucking work. If your site uses javascript to do fucking annoying shite, like putting up some stupid fucking overlay which blocks the whole fucking page whenever you click on anything, or displaying enlarged versions of photos in one of those bastard shiteing lightbox things instead of just fucking loading it as normal, or doing fucking fades and animations and other such stupid bollocks, or replacing some image every few seconds so there is this constant fucking annoying movement going on distracting me from trying to find the important shit, or any other such egregious transgression of the maxim "if it's actually necessary, you can do it without javascript; if you can't do it without javascript, it isn't necessary and there's a 99% chance that you shouldn't even be thinking of doing it at all", that is an excellent way to ensure that all scripts on your whole fucking site will be blocked. If it is simply that the script is written by a cockend who hasn't got a clue, as is so often the case, it won't fucking work. I could carry on like this for fucking ages, but the point is this: there are a million possible reasons why your fucking javascript won't work, so if you assume that it will you are a fucking idiot. Javascript in a page's basic functionality only becomes either necessary or acceptable when the page is doing something like playing Attack of the Lesbian Communists. There is no earthly need to require it to work just to submit a fucking form, so fucking don't.
For fuck's sake, submitting a form is really really fucking simple and has absolutely fuck all requirement for persistent client-side state or scripting or any of that fucking shite. All it needs is a <form> element containing two textareas - one for the reply email address, one for the message - and a <button type="submit">. That is fucking it. No cookies. No javascript. Just a wee bit of standard static HTML. Making it any more complicated than that is fucking stupid to begin with simply because it is not necessary, and making it more complicated in a manner which introduces a very good chance that it will end up not fucking working at all is really mindlessly moronic.
The form includes a captcha which doesn't fucking work. I don't mean it doesn't work because it's too hard to read the bastard thing to figure out what to type in. I mean it doesn't work because it doesn't make any fucking difference what you type in, it just fucking rejects it regardless. Or the fucking image never gets loaded in the first place. Or the "submit" button is part of the captcha and nothing fucking happens when you click it. Or some other fucking stupid shitty thing.
A lot of the time this is for the same kind of fucking stupid cookies-or-javascript-or-both runny dog shit reasons described above in their guise of fucking up the form as a whole, exacerbated by so-called "web designers" not having a fucking clue how to design anything and being so bleeding thick that they can't work out how to do a captcha so they use some tosser's third party captcha instead. For fuck's sake you NEVER DO THIS. EVER. JUST DON'T. For a start a whole lot of these third party captcha doobries are dodgy as fuck and so it is practically certain that their scripts will be blocked. (And the bigger and better-known the provider the more chance that their scripts will already be on the block list. Think Google is "respectable"? Think again. They are the fucking dodgiest of the lot because they are the biggest. The only reason they provide that shit in the first place is so that they can monitor who uses it and where and what for and so on, in order to gather as much personal data as possible which they have no fucking right to have and they can fucking well stick to crawling webpages and stick everything else up their fucking arse. Stuff from Google will not be allowed by default because they're "respectable", it will be blocked by default because they're not fucking respectable in the slightest. So don't bother fucking using it because you can safely assume it won't work.)
Third party captchas also attract an abnormally high percentage of cookie wankers so again it is safe to assume they won't work. And then there are the ones which use for the image an actual photo of some fuzzy numbers or something. Fucking NEVER use these because they are GIANT SLIMY CUNTS. What they are doing is sneakily using unsuspecting humans to read the number because some fucking computer somewhere can't read it, so they farm it out in a captcha and take the most common response as being correct. And their fucking computer shouldn't be fucking trying to read it in the first place because it's none of their fucking business. It's some poor bastard's house number or something and they are trying to collect even personal data which isn't on the internet as well as that which is. By using these cunting things you are helping some bunch of faceless corporate bastards to splurge some poor schmuck's address all over the fucking internet for no fucking reason at all except that they might get 0.000000001 of a cent out of it and they are such ginormous cunts that they do this shit to enough people to make that worthwhile. So NEVER USE THESE BASTARDS' SHITE and tell them to stuff their fucking sneaky devious nasty cunting shite up their fucking arse and follow it with a roll of barbed wire to keep it in there.
And then there is the thing which is possibly the commonest of the lot - that the third party captcha won't work purely and simply because it is fucking shite and it is never going to work. The people who code them are such incredible fucking morons that having the thing fail because they code on the basis of invalid assumptions about what resources are available is less common than having it fail because they simply can't code at all and what they have written is a load of festering shite. I have come across bollock-arsed fucked-up shitty non-working captchas in enough situations where I care enough about the result that I don't just fuck off and try somewhere else that I have on several occasions gone right down to brass tacks trying to figure out what's wrong with the fucking things, sending HTTP requests by hand and parsing the responses by brain to work out what to put in the next HTTP request, and nothing fucking works. No matter how meticulously I ensure that there is no possibility of a client-side error there is no fucking way at all I can get an affirmative response from the server. Because the so-called code running on the server is a complete and utter pile of shite and I could eat a handful of punched cards and puke better code than that.
Look, doing a captcha is really fucking simple and there is no need to use any of this dysfunctional useless bollocks if you have more than a couple of brain cells to rub together. You generate the captcha text and hash it. Then you run the text through a captcha image generator, of which there are numerous free examples on the net, or you can write your own using an imagemagick API or whatever. You base64 encode the output and stick it on the HTML page you are generating, right in the <img> tag as a data-url, and you add an <input type="hidden"> tag to the form with the hash in it. Then when you receive the form submission you hash the captcha response, compare it with the hash from the <input type="hidden">, and see if it's the same or not. It's a piece of piss and there is no fucking need at all to fuck about with third party sneaky fucker services or have anything to do with fucking cookies or javascript.
The form does not work because some cunt-arsed anti-spam bollocks is giving a false positive, so the smeg-munching piece of shit just drops the message on the floor and says nothing about it. Yes, you stupid bastards, I have put the same text in both the "first name" and "last name" fields which you have made fucking compulsory, for no fucking reason because the reply email address is all you fucking need. This is because my name is Pigeon and because there is only one fucking word then of course the "first" and "last" word are the fucking same, you cunts. Yes, the reply email address is of the form derivation-of-your-domain-name@my-domain-name because that way if some spamming shit gets hold of it I will (a) know whose fault it was (looking at you, Plusnet) and (b) be able to stop the spam cold by simply deleting the entry in /etc/aliases. It doesn't mean I'm a fucking spammer, it means I don't trust you not to be, you cunts. Or whatever other thoughtless/stereotypical/bigoted/just plain bleeding idiotic fucking expectation you have pulled out of your arse about what a non-spam message ought to look like which bears no correlation with reality and so I have no idea I'm tripping up on it. I've managed to identify the two specific examples above from the odd occasion when I finally have managed to shove a message through the wall of shitness by some means other than the form and get a reply to it, but there is no reason at all to believe there aren't a whole fuck load more such things which are even more dickheaded. Sort your fucking crappy algorithm out or at the very least check the fucking rejected messages for false positives by hand and fucking do something about them.
The form does not work because whoever wrote it was a fucking dick and doesn't have a clue, so their code is of a quality inferior to that of punched-card vomit. Like with captchas. How any cunt can be so bleeding thick as to cock up sticking a bunch of text into a database with a "new" flag on it or just firing it off to an SMTP server and not even realise would be almost beyond belief were it not for the manifest existence of even more cunts who don't realise the piece of shit the first cunt has given them doesn't fucking work and so allow said first cunt to keep getting away with it.
The form actually does work, but the message goes to a cunt who drops it on the floor. Undoubtedly this does happen, but not very often because the cunt usually just never gets to see the fucking message because the software is shite.
The form does not work for fuck only knows what reason. As I said at the beginning, it is only in some cases that it is possible to glean any inkling as to why the cunt doesn't work. Much of the time it is just being a cunt - a cuntish cunty cuntlike cuntsome cuntulous cunting cunt - and that is all that can be said. It is, however, enough.
For fuck's sake just don't bother with the fucking contact form, just cut the cackle and post up a plain ordinary simple fucking email address. Yes, it'll get spammed. Tough shit. Deal with it. We all get fucking spam and we all fucking hate it but it's a case of shit or get off the pot: until the world comes to its senses and makes any form of advertising as unacceptable as paedophilia, you either get used to calling the spammers a cunt and deleting their crap or never use email at all. Do not make it even more shit for people who are trying to make proper use of it just because you can't get at the cunts who made it shit in the first place.
And if you must use a contact form - for a start make fucking sure you still include the plain email address as well, and to go on with code the fucking thing yourself and make sure it works. It is not hard. This is why the whole business is so especially fucking infuriating: making it work is easy, while making a piece of shit that does not work is more difficult than making something that does work. The reasons these fucking contact forms don't work all boil down to fucking idiots stuffing them full of pointless shit that doesn't need to fucking be there in the first place, and making one that does work is basically a matter of not bothering to go to all the effort of figuring out how to make one that doesn't.
Stupid, stupid, fucking stupid fucking fucking shit.
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