Archive for the 'Forms and Data Collection' Category



Spam be Gone with Captcha ZDR


h1 Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

screenshot of Captcha ZDR

Are you tired of spam bots conquering your forums or membership sites? One solution is to use a Captcha tool. There are lots of Captcha tools available in the Internet. Some are free while others come for a fee. If you're looking for a free one, then you might want to try Captcha ZDR.

Captcha ZDR is an open source PHP script made to eliminate spam attacks. It is a simple yet powerful tool that will help protect your web forms from spammers. If you use this script, you can weed out the spammers from the legitimate users. Captcha ZDR offers several methods of captcha protection namely string protection, calculation protection (sum and deduction), noise in image and string symbols that spam machines will find hard to read. There are 8 backgrounds that you can choose from.

Installing Captcha ZDR is easy. Just download the file. Then follow the instructions inside the compressed file and like magic, your web form will include a captcha tool in it. This will deter spammers from flooding your site with spam. You can easily tweak the result message by adding a line or two to the PHP codes. Other Captcha tools show images that are hard to understand even by legitimate users. This is very frustrating. With Captcha ZDR, legitimate users can easily answer the captcha query.

It is GPL licensed, Captcha ZDR is free to use. Basic PHP knowledge is required.

Go to Captcha ZDR

Hesk, and You Shall Receive (the Customer’s Questions)


h1 Thursday, December 6th, 2007

screenshot of Hesk

Answering comments and questions of customers shows that you care for your clients. However, the hurdle is how to get the questions or comments of your customers. Having your email address in the web site is nice, but often ignored due to the additional effort of creating an email just for a single question. So if you want to ease the burden of your clients and look professional at the same time, try Hesk, your personal help desk software.

Hesk is a free PHP help desk tool that allows you to setup a ticket based support system. It makes use of MySQL server to store pertinent information regarding the ticket. To answer a customer’s ticket, a simple user interface where you can view new, pending, unanswered or reopened tickets is available. Canned replies are also available for those questions that seem to be asked over and over again. Installing Hesk is just a matter of unzipping the zip file on your web server and supplying the needed MySQL information. If you have Fantastico, then the process becomes even simpler. In a short period of time, you will have a professional looking support system that’s guaranteed to take any question or query from your customers without batting a single eyelash.

Hesk requires a web server with PHP 4.3.2 or newer installed, a MySQL database and an FTP client.

Go to Hesk

Always be in Reach with the Website Contact Form Generator


h1 Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

screenshot of Website Contact Form Generator

It may not bring you breakfast in bed, but the Website Contact Form Generator is sure to make you available to your audience easily. The Website Contact Form Generator generates a script that you paste in your page, creating a contact form in your site. This saves your audience the fuss of opening another browser just to create an email of thanks for your site.

The Website Contact Form Generator can provide scripts for ASP, PHP as well as Perl web sites. The best part is that you don’t need to have any particular programming skill to get it working. Just input the required fields and choose what type of script you’d want to get and press “Finish.” You will be provided with a script that you can just copy and paste in your web page. The depth of the entry fields is up to you: you can choose from the most basic one, asking for the email, first and last name or the more advanced one that asks for more information regarding the person trying to contact you. The ease of use in contact form script creation makes the Website Contact Form Generator a must for every web programmer or blogger.

The Website Contact Form Generator runs on most browsers and requires script copy and pasting knowledge.

Go to Website Contact Form Generator

Form field validation made easy


h1 Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

screenshot of Form Field Validation Tool

In soccer, the goal keeper guards his base and makes sure he stops rogue balls before they fly past him. This is exactly the principle behind the Form Field Validation Tool.

This online utility will give you the means to filter some of the most common data entry errors even before they are submitted, thus enabling the user to have a chance to make the necessary corrections. The intuitive interface makes it user-friendly. With its cut-and-paste simplicity, no programming experience is required.

There are four types of validations possible. One of the most useful is specifying the minimum and maximum character lengths permissible. By setting the minimum to 1, you can make sure a field is not left blank (a required field). Another one that’s often used is email validation, which makes certain that the structure of the email address entered conforms to standards. The third type limits the exact number of digits possible for a given field, which is useful for phone numbers, zip codes or dates. Optional characters can also be ignored so as to not count against this limit. Lastly, a value range can be defined to make sure the field entries are within acceptable quantities. For example, an age field can be arranged to fall only between 0 and 120, with other values considered extraneous. A customized error message can also be flashed so that the form user may know what to correct in the form fields.

This online tool can be accessed through all of the leading browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

Go to Form Field Validation Tool

Put a form on your web site


h1 Friday, July 13th, 2007

screenshot

If you want a simple way to receive information or feedback from your customers, Response-O-Matic can help you accomplish this in a few easy steps. Response-O-Matic is a simple tool that lets website owners place a contact form on their website. This means that no programming knowledge is needed for you to get your form up and running – you just need to Copy and Paste. The whole process takes under 8 minutes to complete.

The free version lets you create only one form per account – which is usually enough for one website. You can ask an unlimited number of questions on your form, as well as receive an unlimited number of submissions from your website visitors. The form submissions you get are also spam-protected, so you won’t be wasting time looking at data you can’t use. Once a website visitor has submitted their answers to your form, you can automatically send them to a webpage of your choice (this could be a thank you page or your homepage).

Other behind-the-scenes features include automatic data back ups and a stats package that lets you see the geographic location of your website visitors. Response-O-Matic’s free version is enough for a website owner’s basic needs, but if you own several websites that need customer feedback, you might want to look into the paid versions. The paid versions don’t embed advertising in your forms, and you may also export your data to Microsoft Excel.

If you want to take a quick peek at Response-O-Matic’s features, you can go to their website and check out examples of forms you can create with their automatic service.

Go to Response-O-Matic