To all form mail users,

I'd like to describe our current situation and stance on the use of our form mail system, and then I'll throw some ideas your way to incite a conversation that should result in meeting everyone's needs.

Back in the day (IMG:http://forums.networksolutions.com/style_emoticons/default/whistling.gif) , as a courtesy, we stood up a system by which our customers could create forms on their stores to solicit email feedback from their customers. There are some bad people out in cyberspace taking advantage of this system in ways that we cannot allow any longer. I'm not speaking of honest uses here. While we could say that we cannot support such a system any longer and that our customers have plenty of options (paying for use from someone else), we don't believe that shows the kind of commitment to you that you deserve. Here's what we propose:

• Version 7 customers will not be supported via form mail, as the system now has integrated functionality (via custom forms).
• The existing form mail system will only allow emails to be sent to the addresses of our v4 clients via a whitelist.
• We will load the email addresses stored in each customer's "Send New Order Email Alerts To" field in the Admin Panel into the whitelist.
• We will have a seven-day grace period (once we make this thing official) so that you may react to said change (update your forms).

We are currently testing the necessary changes to implement this quickly.

Please understand that we must use some sort of whitelist of addresses to which this system may send email. There is no way around this part.

So, that's it. Now, please share your thoughts -- agreeable or not. Comments? Questions?

So are you saying the perl or: http://formmail.monstercommerce.com/cgi-bi...l/ntformmail.pl will no longer work? Or it will work but you will not support it?

It will work for 4x clients and will allow sending of emails to the address listed in their admin panel. It will not be supported for 7x clients because of the custom form capability built into 7x.

There are people still on 4? I migrated from 4 to 7 so i take it that this will affect me?

I looked for information on obtaining a service that will provide perl scripts for FormMail, but it is very difficult to understand how to use and implement it. Any suggestions on how to quickly and easily make this change?

Our online store uses custom FormMail that allows the customer to approve artwork. It's nice because I get the email and can put it in our records. An example can be found here: Click Here I have also made a custom contact form that is nested into an iFrame that allows customers to contact us.

The contact page that the v.7 uses is very.....ugly. It looks like it was designed by a high schooler and the fact that it is not very customizable is another flaw.

I'm sorry if I sound frustrated, I'm just tired of always having to find work-arounds because the v.7 takes away a good feature or doesn't have something that the v.4 had. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but so far the disadvantages are out weighing the advantages of this migration.

Could you also elaborate on "will allow sending of emails to the address listed in their admin panel". Thanks.

Yes to both questions. But, again, this is my proposal; not gospel yet. Your feedback is hugely appreciated!


More comments and suggestions on what you'd like to see on the custom form designer are welcome. But please read on, as I have an example at the bottom.


Don't apologize. I'm in need of this feedback.


In v4, it is the "Send New Order Email Alerts To" value in the Admin Panel.

With v7, you can override the default value of the recipient email address for individual forms.

I put your same form on my test site (exucse the ugliness that it is). But, as you can see, it keeps the look and feel of your site intact. http://www.corporateeventgifts.com/approveartworkaspx.aspx

After reviewing this, please tell me your thoughts.

My feedback is that NS offer a perl script for customers so that it might work. I understand that there are people out there that are taking advantage of the service you offer. Maybe an answer would be to offer the service for a small fee. I guess that the programming knowledge I have only goes so far. I guess I would need guidance on where and how I could get a new script if there are no other options.




I think the solution would be wrap the code in editable unique css divs or tables. Right now if I change the input.textbox field in my css it affects all of them site. I need attributes that would allow me to edit the items individually.



Will look into this and see what it entails.



It looks like it might work, but check my earlier comments about css. I am pretty particular about the design of our site, and can't really see how it would fit with it's current status.

stodds-
I do not agree. V7 has the custom forms feature does not mean that you have to force your V7 customer to abandon their forms and redo everything. If you think whitelist in V4 can solve the problem, then it should work in V7 too.

Also, it you think paying a small fee can make situation better, maybe it's an option.

There are many ways to specify styles in CSS for a single page...

- The form currently conssits of unique <div> tags, each one has a unique ID, so you could use the unique ID of each div to style the textbox. Clearly this isn't cascading, so not very friendly:



- You could put a <style> section in the page HTML, so it applies only to that page. To keep it contained in the middle section, you could qualify the CSS rule by using the prefix "td.page-column-center", example:



Also, each page on the site has a unique CSS class on the <body> element that matches the name of the friendly URL. This allows you to specify styles specific to a single page. Using Chris's example, his page "approveartworkaspx.aspx" has the <body> class "approveartworkaspx-page". In your CSS stylesheet, similar to the example, you can style all textboxes on this page using:



An easy trick to find any page's unique <body> class is to simply take the page URL and replace ".aspx" with "-page".

Hope that helps.

I suppose you are correct. It is difficult to move masses of people away from a solution, even if it is inferior (not necessarily from a functionality standpoint). Management of a whitelist can be a little more than one "bargains for."

Truth be told, by moving eveyone off the very old solution and to the built-in solution with 7.x, I was trying to avoid nickel and diming customers.

We've been begging for a return of the FormMail we had implemented in V4 since the migration to V7 last Fall. It's just been one headache after another.

We have an unlimited account with DH so we set up a replacement FormMail CGI on their server, only to find out that NetSol's asp .Net meant we needed some javascript trickery and an <iframe> since <form> is "abused" by .Net. The hassles over iframes led us to abandon this approach.

We re-created the form, after tremendous CSS-rewrites, with the V7 custom forms and settled for loss of CGI features like the email appearing to originate from the form submitter's supplied address. Now when we reply we must copy and paste the email they provide because all emails originate from our own "orders@" account.

Then NetSol decided to put a Captcha at the bottom and added something like a 100 second timeout, which is now 300 seconds. We noticed a dramatic drop in the number of info requests submitted via our form before discovering the change. People weren't doing the Captcha or they were timing out and simply not re-submitting.

As it stands, with our ecommerce needs being so simple, and having to learn the V7 admin panel and re-adjust every time NetSol decides to make changes, we're considering a full port to php on DH with PayPal...it's a difficult choice when the business continues to grow and NetSol offers so many other features.

I have to agree. We pump quite a bit of money to NS. We also pay for their SEO service. We run alot of custom forms. After this change, the owner of our company has requested that I start searching for additional ecommerce providers.

You can go straight through formmail.com and use their service, which has many more features than what the formmail we provided previously had. Their site states they offer this for less than $1 per month.