The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Lovely Radio Buttons In Contact Form 7
By · CommentsRadio buttons add pizazz to your custom submission form and are easier for some site visitors to use. There’s always the problem of remembering to click out of the radio button to make sure it doesn’t change, but all in all, they are very quick. And we all know how fast our site visitors want things to flow.
If you’re brave and ambitious, you could create surveys using this feature of the WordPress Contact Form 7 plugin.
Spam Fighter – Acceptance Checkbox
By · CommentsI had never thought about it until Takayuki suggested it, but adding an acceptance checkbox to your custom CF7 form is just one more barrier between you and those wish-they’d-give-up spammers.
Not only does it serve to remind the site visitor of your Terms of Service (you do have one, right?), but that one extra step, that manual clicking in the checkbox, is another way of screening sincere parlay-ers of your website information from those with less than sincere intentions.
This is an example of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. Nothing that hard for your site visitor, one extra step of protection for you. Most people will appreciate your efforts to prevent spam.
Quiz Those Spammers Out of Business!
By · CommentsAnother great spam fighter within the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin is the quiz option. You can require the site visitor to answer math problems (like Google does) or tell you the color of grass. Just one more obstacle for those just-don’t-get-it spammers.
Quizzes are less of a problem for the novice webdesigner because they don’t require the server support that CAPTCHAs do. And, for some of your site visitors, they will be much easier to understand than the strange combination of numbers and letters on a CAPTCHA.
Personally, I like the combination of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. I’ll talk about that on my next blog post.
Captivating CAPTCHAs
By · CommentsCAPTCHA, all caps, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Hmmm, CAPTCHA is easier to remember. CAPTCHAs, plural, has a small s on the end.
Let’s just focus on what it does: helps prevent spam. A CAPTCHA can be a picture or numbers that must be typed in by the site visitor thus preventing machine spam.
CAPTCHAs are sometimes hard for site visitors to read. For the webmaster, difficulties occur if your webhost doesn’t provide a graphic library to store them.
With Contact Form 7, you, the webdesigner, can choose to use CAPTCHA when you create forms. Before you do, be sure to download the “Really Simple CAPTCHA” plugin, and then activate it.
Next, create a new form with Contact Form 7 and configure it. When you generate the CAPTCHA tag, you can choose from 3 sizes and enter color codes to customize it to your website. Here’s the one I did as an example using a black background and green text:
Very simple to do, thanks to Takayuki Miyoshi, the plugin developer.
Spammers, Contact Form 7, And You
By · CommentsThose spammers, what do they think they’re going to accomplish by bombarding us with emails? Here’s how to prevent spamming through your online forms that you’ve created with Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7 gives you three options to control spam: CAPTCHA, quizzes, Akismet, or even a combination of the three. Today, I’m going to talk about Akismet. I’ll cover the other two in the next two posts.
Akismet will prevent human spamming. It doesn’t work as well with forms as it does with blog posts, but it is worth using. Akismet will look at the name, email, and URL and make the decision: is or isn’t it spam? Once that decision is made, the site visitor is notified with one of the messages below.
So, that’s one more barrier those spammers have to crawl over to get to your inbox! 
To learn all about Contact Form 7, take a look here.
