Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

We have about 200 help pages for Sandvox, available at docs.karelia.com; also available from our Help menu. We recently added a feature, inspired by some Apple pages, in which there is a link to provide feedback at the bottom of each page. (See this page as an example.)

The link goes to a web-based form that allows the visitor to enter their opinion of the referring page. It's powered on the back-end by a simple PHP script that converts the form submission into an email message to us.

So far we have gotten a handful of good comments, but there are a couple of adjustments we had to implement to make this viable:

• Prompt people gently that they will need to enter their email address if they are expecting a reply. We've gotten several submissions from people who use the form as a kind of tech support, hoping that we'll answer their question. It's hard to reply if they don't include an email address!
• Spam-avoidance. We've had pretty good luck with honeypots. (I'd rather avoid a CAPTCHA if possible.) Essentially, we provide a couple of extra inputs that the spam-bots will probably fill in with spammish content. These inputs are not visible to the site visitor, so any submission with these fields filled in is very likely to be spam. Without this deterrant in place, most of our submissions have not been exactly relevant to the Sandvox....

I'm glad we added this feature to our documentation. Someday, I might change the link at the bottom of the page to do some "Ajax" magic and reveal a comment form right there on the same page, so that the visitor can see the page that they are commenting on, rather than taking them to a separate form. But that's #87,454 on my list of things to do.