Akismet is great at stopping comment spam on blogs, but that’s not the only way they can “get you.” I suspect that spammer are the kind of people who are civil enough in everyday life, but they are really cold and creepy defectors at heart; smiling, sneaky, self-concerned defectors. I don’t want them to see my address. They’d sell their grandmother for a nickle; they DO market what belongs to me (my address) any chance they get, and they’ll steal anyone’s bandwidth / computer’s processing (through botnets) to send their worthless scams if they can.
We know these evil, souless, zombies must be thwarted, so I never do business with the scammers, I encouage everyone to keep their anti-malware software up-to-date, and I try to avoid leaving my email address out in plain sight to be ripped-off or “vacuumed” by their devious Internet robots.
I’ve found a nice solution for my site. I want real people to be able to contact me, but I don’t want to expose MY email address to the grasp of the despicable theives. I’ve just place a drop-in mailer on my about page, so real people can send messages to my email box, but spam-zombies can’t do a search and grab my address (to flood with noxious scams, or sell to even more evil zombie kin).
I’ll tell you how you can do the same.
Go to jotform.com, register, select new form, and navigate to the “contact” template. They do offer several other useful form templates, for example, a form for small-scale ecommerce (using Paypal or Google Checkout), and a few color combinations that might match your blog. Users can even customize a form fields (without knowing html or css). Finally, grab the link to your new contact form and add it to your WordPress site. Pretty cool.
