Letterbird Contact Form

Posted on December 6, 2024

Tagged TIL, TIL, 11ty : How and why I added a contact form

I recently helped a friend with trying to get a Wordpress site back into service. (Okay, actually, I highjacked her old site because it actually has content and moved it into a more modern site as part of my learning web building once again). During that process, I was struck by what a chore it is to fight back against spam comments. It occurred to me that with the number of comments expected on any site I publish, I could easily handle any comments with a contact form. My idea is that no spammer will be able to automate that whole process of filling out the contact form, given that the results would never "automatically" be published.

My plan is that if when (if?) I get comments on a post, I will personally copy and paste the comments to the post after the other content. That sounds crazy, but so does moderating 280 spam comments in a short period as you might get on a Wordpress site.

Other alternatives were using GitHub based systems which would require commenters to authenticate through GitHub....not feasible for my non-tech family and friends. Of course Disqus has built a business by providing comment forums, but the free version is ad-supported-not my cup of tea.

Letterbird from some perfectly adequate folks at goodenough.us seems to be exactly my cup of tea. It integrates well into the website, even using the free version. I surely don't mind the branding on the form for a site I'm using just to get back into web building. With Fastmail (highly recommended), I can filter out the emails from the contact form very easily and keep those out of my inbox.

Implementation was around ten minutes. That's my kind of project.