Contact Forms, how can they be this hard?!?!

[chris321]

Right, I'm in the process of building myself a fairly basic website, nothing special, but I'm trying to get a contact form and it just won't work.

It's hosted with 000webhost, and they offer templates and add-in modules etc. Using the one supplied requires no knowledge whatsoever, you tell it you want a contact form on that page, give it the details of what fields you want to have, what e-mail address to send the message to etc etc, which is fine, except it just won't work. And because it's all template-driven, there's no real way of looking at the code and seeing what's wrong.

Fine I thought, I'll use a free one, found one online that is free and just has a small line of text underneath advertising them. Put in your e-mail address, fields etc, it generates the code to upload, and it STILL WON'T WORK.

So I've been poking around at the code, given up on the built-in one as there's nothing I can really do with it, but I'm open to suggestions as to my next port of call?

I know it all sounds very vague so I'm not expecting anyone to come up with an instant answer from what I've said, but is there any more info I can give to make the problem easier to diagnose?

Thanks a lot,

Chris

 

[aligibbs]

Hi Chris,
Sounds like that webserver might just not be setup to send mail at all. I would log a ticket with the host and get them to look into it

 

[chris321]

Hi Chris,
Sounds like that webserver might just not be setup to send mail at all. I would log a ticket with the host and get them to look into it

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight............ What exactly is a 'ticket', and how would I go about logging one? (can you tell I'm new at this )

I've been shuffling things around, I've not got a different error message. Before when you clicked 'submit' it refused to load up the next page. Now it tried, but says 'this page could not be found', which I'm assuming means there's something wrong in the script somewhere that tells it where to go after sending the message, a confirmation page or similar?

Obviously it's still not actually sending anything, that would be far too much to ask for, but I suppose it's a step in the right direction :bang:

 

[aligibbs]

Sorry, I mean contact support and ask them why built in contact form isn't working (known usually as "putting in a support ticket"). They should be able to advise. Without errors etc, its very difficult to know what's going wrong.

 

[chris321]

Gotcha, thanks, it probably should have been my first move, but I was being ever stubborn and trying to sort it out myself. Now I've just got to find out how to contact support!

 

[jasonmlloyd]

Try www.emailmeform.com

Works great on our website and very easy to set up.

 

[Karlos]

It might be worth pointing out that you should be a little bit wary of using third party form-to-email services.

Firstly they can take the service down at any time and essentially break your enquiry form, I've had customers go nearly 6 months without realising their forms were broken!

Secondly, you have to ask yourself why they would offer to send emails for you for free, it might be just as simple as advertising, or it could be a bit more sinister - perhaps they are selling enquiries to the competition as qualified leads, collecting email addresses for mailing lists etc etc

 

[chris321]

Having done some searching, I now know what the problem is! There's a notice on the 000webhost that server 37 is a bit dodgy (I'm paraphrasing), and won't be able to generate e-mails from contact forms for the forseeable future.

Take a guess which of their servers my website is held on?

Apparently the only solution is to start up a new account, and migrate everything over to the new one, which hopefully will be linked to a different one. Not a clue how I'm going to go about that though, time for some more reading on the matter I think

Cheers for all the input everyone

 

[Harvey_nikon]

Actually you could always set the contact form up to update an sql database with entries and then you could read them from there.

It's an easy enough thing to do and I'd have a bash at it myself for you but I am just swamped

 

[chris321]

Actually you could always set the contact form up to update an sql database with entries and then you could read them from there.

Ahhh, of course, why didn't I think of that...............

It's an easy enough thing to do and I'd have a bash at it myself for you but I am just swamped

Seriously, thanks so much for the offer . I've submitted a tickety thing to see what the support people say, but if not much can be done could I drop you a PM and you could have a poke whenever you're less busy? I'm in no rush at all, be it days, weeks, months etc, it's only a test run and no-one has the address, so no urgency whatsoever!

Chris