How can your readers contact you?

Forum Rules

Helios_Multi TPoxygen11final

[Snoskred]

I've been doing a bit of surfing blogs (not blogs belonging to people from here) today and I have noticed a distinct lack of email addresses or contact forms.

I wanted to invite some fellow bloggers along to the forums and the task was made virtually impossible. In some cases I was unable to send an email and I didn't really want to leave a comment, but sometimes that was my only option.

This leads me to ask a question -

Have you thought about how your readers can get in touch with you?

At the very minimum, you should have an image with your email address in it - this prevents spam. I posted links to some email icon generators on the forums recently.

Most Wordpress bloggers have the ability to add contact forms - often via the cforms plugin. I was surprised to find a lot of the Wordpress blogs I visited did not have a contact page, or an email address on the about page.

Maybe that is the secret to getting more done - stop people from being able to contact me! a-ha! But I thought I would mention it here as I found it very frustrating.. does anyone else struggle with this?

[Mistress B]

I hadn't ever even thought of it. I guess I didn't really consider that there would be much reason for my readers to contact me.

Might have to rethink that.........

[Meg]

Beat me to the punch Snos, I was going to start a topic on the same thing.

Out of 50 blogs I visited 8 didn't have a contact method (that's 16% for the lazy )

[Kelley]

I remember reading something when I first started saying that you should always ALWAYS have a way for people to contact you.  Sometimes, like you have found, people don't want to leave a comment for the world to see.

I get a lot of advocacy work through my blog.  People contact me to ask about services and information about Autism and Aspergers.  Questions that they wouldn't otherwise ask. 

And then there are the people just wanting to tell me how wonderful I am *snort*.

But I am really glad that I decided to put that information out there.

[macgirvin]

We have our own mail system. No need for contact forms, just send me a mail or drop in the chat room when I'm there. Post on the forums if it's a general issue.

I have my postal address listed on the legal TOS/EULA pages to contact me for DMCA takedowns and other stuff that involves lawyers. This is required if you don't want to get sued for the acts of your members. I really have no desire to make my internet email address available to the slimeballs that use this communication method. 

[KirstenL4W]

One of the many reasons I was happy to switch to WP was the ability to have a contact form.  I did NOT want my email address out there on my old blog for the bots to find, and though I liked the concept behind the email address in an image, I still was not crazy about that either, because as we all know there are humans who apparently get paid to spam, and a human can read an image.  Now I'm thrilled to bits to have the conatct form, because it allows people to get in touch with me without my email being out there at all, and spammers are much less likely to fill out a comment form.

[macgirvin]

and spammers are much less likely to fill out a comment form

That hasn't been my experience. They'll not only spam comment/contact forms, they'll spam the username and password field on the login screen. Basically any place on the site that allows you type in text.

[Sueblimely]

I have a contact form as a separate page on my Wordpress blog. When I was using Blogger I used the service provided by Contactify.

[Ian]

Thanks for the reminder Snoskred.  I had contact options on my blogger blog but forgot about it when setting up the new wordpress one.

Now rectified with a spanking new Contact Me page.

[Riayn]

I don't really want to have my email address on my site for the world to see, even if it is hardcoded so that the spam bots can't read it.

Any other ideas how people can contact me on a wordpress.com site?

[Mistress B]

I now have my brandspanking new contact form up.

Yay me

[Meg]

Riayn

This should solve your problem nicely:

http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/04/23/contact-forms/

[Jaycee]

It does bother me when there's no form of contact and I've blogged about this. It's basic website usability that a lot of people don't bother about. I don't think it matters whether the site is big or small, personal or a corporation's website, there should be a method of contact. I tried contacting my air conditioner's manufacturer in China and they didn't have a contact form either. It's very frustrating.

[scotty]

and spammers are much less likely to fill out a comment form

That hasn't been my experience. They'll not only spam comment/contact forms, they'll spam the username and password field on the login screen. Basically any place on the site that allows you type in text.

I'll say the same as well.

I have recently removed the contact forms from my blogs and just leave my email address on my contact pages. The spam filtering on my primary email address does a much better job than spam filtering on the contact form. I also found it pointless to encrypt/obfuscate your email addresses on line. Once it got onto a spammer's list (by whatever means), it will be traded/swapped/sold to all other spammers and there is simply no way out. I'll just focus on server-side filtering for now...