Ask HN: What's the best contact form solution these days?

1 points by SnowingXIV ↗ HN
Built the site on Jekyll, on shared hosting. My contact forms are for the most part similar throughout the site, I have an _includes partial that is a basic side form form and another one for the main contact form that has a few other fields.

I've whipped up a solution using ajax. Run it through bootstrap validation js, and then take form values. If successful, it now displays an alert and gives conversion info to GA. Before I had it drop a simple message below the form but many people would double-triple-quadruple click and would result in multiple emails sent. This has helped a lot but I've noticed a lag time sometimes after hitting submit. Trying to determine the bottleneck.

Now each page has a contact form that's essentially a landing page that passes in a hidden value which is nice because it allows me to assign that to a title/within the form that sends out emails to the group that maintains these contacts. End of the day it's simply POST through -> PHP mail().

Eventually I can see myself having 40 very similar partials. I could just cut out the hidden value of the include and put that individually on each page instead. I also would like to store the submissions. I've hooked up a curl request to a CRM, but not everyone is on board with the CRM so I might want to store the values in a simple database of some sort.

The other issue is sometimes email clients such as 0365 will change the "from" field because I rename the header so instead of noreply@infodomain.com it's mydumbservernamenumbers@something.com via noreply@infodomain.com.

I've looked at formkeep, formspree, and other solutions but nothing seems to be quite what I need and my custom solution does work and doesn't cost me anything or have some arbitrary send limits.

1 comment

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I've used wufoo.com before. I like their online editor.