Collect email address from a web form on a simple website - forms

I've created a dead simple landing page, with a text-field form to collect email addresses. But the thing is, there's no database, no backend of any kind, so how I hook up the form to actually collect the inputed data when it's submitted?!?
I've done this a bunch of times in Rails apps or on Wordpress, is there a service to allow me to do this in a normal static webpage? Maybe a script to route to a Google spreadsheet or something?
This is not a wordpress site etc. so I can't use a plugin for a certain platform, just a totally standard, vanilla website.


Turns out there's a service called Cloudstitch that makes it really easy to post data to a Google spreadsheet.

Related

iOS user authentication (restrict to specific domain name)

I'm developing my first iPhone app to make what is effectively an app version of a fantasy league I created for work colleagues.
I am using Parse for the backend of the app. I only want people to be able to register with their work email address ie only if their e-mail address is _#mycompany.com
I'm sure this would be quite easy to someone who knew what htey were doing but I'm kind of new to this so any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks

You could do this in a number of ways. The easiest way would be to have the validation happen on-device - just check the e-mail address the user has put into the app, and only allow the registration to happen if it matches the domain you want to limit it to.
However, although this is very easy it's also open to abuse and it's not very flexible (if you want to add additional domains, you have to update the app).
Fortunately, Parse offers cloud code, which lets you validate data server-side. Cloud code is written in JavaScript, and you then upload it to Parse. There is full documentation on Parse's website, including examples for validating data.

How websites like Facebook are protected against bot without any captcha

How websites like Facebook and Twitter are protected against bot during registration? I mean, there's no captcha at all on the signup form?
I want to create a signup form for a project, and I don't want bot during registration and Captchas are often ugly..
edit:
My question is really during the registration because I know Facebook uses Captchas once registred for the first time.

Facebook uses some sort of hidden spam protection, if you view source of sign-up form you will see things like:
class="hidden_elem"><div class="fsl fwb">Security Check</div>This is a standard security test that we use to prevent spammers from creating fake accounts and spamming users.
so capture becomes visible when javascript will think that you are a bot.
Where is few methods of making it harder for bots to complete registration without capture, things
like timing to fill out form, originators of mouse clicks events ect.
also random session based values in form (to privent direct submissions without downloading of the form first)
also some people use hidden form elements with common names like 'email' that is styled invisible in css but common simple bots will try to fill out all form fields and so you can block them if this hidden element have any value
twitter and fb spend lot of time on developing tecniques to block spammers i don't think they will made it public as it will be counter productive for them to fight the spammers.
But all the client side javascripts you can download from fb or twitter and study them if you want, because most of the protection will happen inside client not on server.
server could only issue some random session variable, check for valid headers in request, overall time etc. its really limited.
some sites are also use ajax exchanges between server and client during the time when user is filling out the form , mostly just to make it harder for bot developer to do simular fake exchanges of data.
Anyway, unfortunatelly where is no easy solution to do decent protection , espesially without captcha or some kind of question
also,
for submit button you can use image map instead of button,
you can dynamically create big image with a submit botton image drawn on it at random position using things like GDI in PHP and using css to display only portion of that image with the actuall button, and on server side check X and Y position of where mouse was clicked, this will be hard for bots to break.
Unless they use real browsers and just emulate keyboard and mouse. Anyway , as i said unfortunatelly where is no easy solution.

One way would be to send a verification to the user's email address or cell phone and obtain verification (so in that case, you would have to allow only one email address or cell phone per account)
Another option is to use "Negative CAPTCHA" or "Honeypot Captcha"

I don't know how Facebook and Twitter do it, but if you want to create something simple and that doesn't interfere with your site aesthetics, I know that some websites just ask the user to enter an answer to a simple math problem like "what is 2 + 3?". This is not the most secure way to do it, but it's just a thought.

Well you can always deploy hardware solutions as well to create Layer 4-7 firewall rules. You can create specific rules to look for the well known agents of bots crawling the web. However to stop newly created bots you need to know what agent they are using for the bot.

Since you don't want CAPTCHA, you can use Keypic - keypic.com - which is an invisible protection, no CAPTCHA needed. It's an efficient antispam method for any web form. Site users don't pass any tests which is good for the site as it improves the quality of the user experience and thus raises user engagement. The solution is a kind of an expert system which analyses the behaviour of the users and checks the databases, then makes a conclusion if the request comes from a legitimate user or a robot.
BTW, Twitter and Facebook still use CAPTCHA for password verification which is a very disputable method in terms of efficiency of such protection.

I had a problem with tons of bots signing up for my Nintendo site so I put a single image of Mario on the sign-up page (making sure nothing in the image data said "Mario") with the text "Who is this? Answer in one word." Haven't had a single bot sign-up since. Not sure if this is actually a good solution though, not sure how smart bots are. I'm kind of surprised that it worked.
In theory it might be keeping out a few legitimate users, but it is hard to imagine many legitimate users of a Nintendo site not knowing who Mario is...

Facepile embedded with email

Interested to find out how to embed data from facebook such as a "facepile" into an email that is generated server side. Can only find doco on adding to a web page.
Realise the email can not using javascript to grab realtime data in the email but interested in grabbing a snap shot in time of the "facepile" and adding that to an email.
ie static content
Also interested in doing the same thing with a facebook "activity feed".

Theoretically yes, but it's incredibly unlikely that any email client will render client-side javascript or iframes, which means effectively there's no point in trying to do this as best-case scenario is that the majority of people will get a broken email, and the rest will have the email automatically blocked or deleted because of the javascript

Is it possible to create a limited registration signup form using Google Docs Forms?

I would like to create an event signup form using Google Docs. The user is able to select which session they would like to attend, but I need to somehow limit the number of people that can register for each session.
I can not find a way to do this using the standard form creator GUI, however I think it might be possible to do using Google Apps Script. I would need to be able to customize the form that is loaded to remove sessions that are already full based on a query to the underlying spreadsheet.
Is this possible, or should I look into other Web Form surveys?

The Google Apps Script Template site has some good templates to help you do something like this. In particular, the Course Registration template sounds like what you should use.

Autofill an HTML form

What applications exist that can take a series of fields from my db (or csv output from my db) and insert them into a web-based form and then submit that form?
Big Picture Use Case:
I maintain an in-house registration management system for webinars that we produce/present. Currently we use GoToWebinar.com to host our events but they haven't always been (and may not always continue to be) our vendor.
GoToWebinars.com does not provide me an API for creating registrations for 3rd party individuals. So when someone decides to attend one of our events they have to fill out 2 registrations forms, mine and GoToWebinars.com. I'd like to automate the task of filling in GoToWebinar's registration form.

I am looking into the same thing. I found some bits and pieces here and there and was able to decipher the URL to post to GTW:
https://www.gotowebinar.com/en_US/island/webinar/registration.flow?Template=island/webinar/registration.tmpl&Form=webinarRegistrationForm&WebinarKey=XXX_YOUR_WEBINAR_ID_XXX&Name_First=ViewersFirstName&Name_Last=ViewersLastName&Email=ViewersEmailAddress
If you are using cURL, then be sure to use CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION because there are some redirections on the GTW side and cURL needs to follow them.
So far this seems to work for us.
Good luck!

I'm late to the party, but let me offer a way to call the CITRIX API via PHP to register a new GotoWebinar attendee, in case somebody else hits this page looking for the answer to your question.