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Another "interactive" part: contact forms. Not every business site wants comments, but they'll probably want a contact form. Putting an email address out is an

Another "interactive" part: contact forms. Not every business site wants comments, but they'll probably want a contact form. Putting an email address out is an alternative, but handling the input pipeline is better. On a static site that requires finding a service they trust to handle the submission and correctly plug it in their site. It becomes another moving part, potentially another bill that needs to be paid separately, another bit to deal with when the industry consolidates etc.

foresto 2y ago
More often than not, the contact forms that I encounter impose one or more hassles on the visitor: Please enable JavaScript. Please allow scripts from these off-site domains to execute on your computer. Please enter a return address hosted by an approved email provider. Please read through all the categories in this drop-down list and select the one that best fits your message. Please fill in these required fields and re-submit the form. Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com. Please waste your time repeatedly solving annoying puzzles, until our CAPTCHA provider can sufficiently fingerprint you and your browser. Please re-type the text you already entered, because we reset some or all of the form fields due to one of the above complaints. No thanks. If I'm at a contact page, it is most likely because I have something of value to the site owner, such as potential business or knowledge of something broken on their site. If they expect me to jump through hoops, I won't bother. In principle, contact forms could be nice enough, just as many web sites could be clear, simple, quick-loading, static pages. In practice, they're generally a burden. Given that they don't offer much to the visitor even in the best case, I would rather just see an email address.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Yes! It's a plague that's hurting most generic content submissions services. Most Saas in that area can't see the difference between a freelance portfolio site where you can send work offers and the support form of your local telecom where people will send death threats. At the end of the day, for the lambda user it's just better to have the forms handled on the same platform as the site (wix, squarespace etc.) than dealing with a generic solution elsewhere. > email address On the receiving end, the advantage of the contact form is to map it to something else that email (Google Sheets etc.). Of course you can set an automated email box that will process the incoming mail into something else, but that's just an additional burden.
- immibis 2y ago
  These hurdles only exist for the 0.0001% of people who deliberately hampered their own web experience in an attempt to reduce ads or tracking.
  - foresto 2y ago
    I gave eight examples (which themselves are an incomplete list). Nitpicking at two of them while ignoring the rest, and projecting fault onto people who experience them, doesn't refute the overall point. This is worth a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
sneak 2y ago
An email address is the best contact form. Anything else is overengineering.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Email has surprising hurdles IMHO. For instance it means leaving the browser and have the default email client handling it. For some people it becomes a distraction, for other they didn't even setup the default client so it's a setup screen and hey have to copy/paste the email to their gmail tab. Other people actually don't want to give their email but will give a phone number, or their Twitter handle, a chat ID, or their address, or anything else really. A form is more maintenance, but can be pretty beneficial to address a general public.
  - sneak 2y ago
    The browser is the email client for most everyone. For everyone else it’s the gmail app.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    People who contact your business by e-mail or contact form are immensely much better customers than people who contact through a chat message or such. As a business you want to deal with e-mail customers and not WhatsApp/Messenger people, because 9 times out of 10, the chat people want an answer to a question and won't even say thanks after getting the answer and of course will never become actual customers.
account42 2y ago
This may blow your mind but you can have static pages AND a dynamic endpoint for form submission. You could even put such endpoints under a common directory, /cgi-bin/ perhaps.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Just let me put a blinking "under construction" gif on my form page while I'm trying to figure how this cgi thing works.

foresto 2y ago

More often than not, the contact forms that I encounter impose one or more hassles on the visitor: Please enable JavaScript. Please allow scripts from these off-site domains to execute on your computer. Please enter a return address hosted by an approved email provider. Please read through all the categories in this drop-down list and select the one that best fits your message. Please fill in these required fields and re-submit the form. Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com. Please waste your time repeatedly solving annoying puzzles, until our CAPTCHA provider can sufficiently fingerprint you and your browser. Please re-type the text you already entered, because we reset some or all of the form fields due to one of the above complaints. No thanks. If I'm at a contact page, it is most likely because I have something of value to the site owner, such as potential business or knowledge of something broken on their site. If they expect me to jump through hoops, I won't bother. In principle, contact forms could be nice enough, just as many web sites could be clear, simple, quick-loading, static pages. In practice, they're generally a burden. Given that they don't offer much to the visitor even in the best case, I would rather just see an email address.

makeitdouble 2y ago
Yes! It's a plague that's hurting most generic content submissions services. Most Saas in that area can't see the difference between a freelance portfolio site where you can send work offers and the support form of your local telecom where people will send death threats. At the end of the day, for the lambda user it's just better to have the forms handled on the same platform as the site (wix, squarespace etc.) than dealing with a generic solution elsewhere. > email address On the receiving end, the advantage of the contact form is to map it to something else that email (Google Sheets etc.). Of course you can set an automated email box that will process the incoming mail into something else, but that's just an additional burden.
immibis 2y ago
These hurdles only exist for the 0.0001% of people who deliberately hampered their own web experience in an attempt to reduce ads or tracking.
- foresto 2y ago
  I gave eight examples (which themselves are an incomplete list). Nitpicking at two of them while ignoring the rest, and projecting fault onto people who experience them, doesn't refute the overall point. This is worth a read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sneak 2y ago

An email address is the best contact form. Anything else is overengineering.

makeitdouble 2y ago
Email has surprising hurdles IMHO. For instance it means leaving the browser and have the default email client handling it. For some people it becomes a distraction, for other they didn't even setup the default client so it's a setup screen and hey have to copy/paste the email to their gmail tab. Other people actually don't want to give their email but will give a phone number, or their Twitter handle, a chat ID, or their address, or anything else really. A form is more maintenance, but can be pretty beneficial to address a general public.
- sneak 2y ago
  The browser is the email client for most everyone. For everyone else it’s the gmail app.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  People who contact your business by e-mail or contact form are immensely much better customers than people who contact through a chat message or such. As a business you want to deal with e-mail customers and not WhatsApp/Messenger people, because 9 times out of 10, the chat people want an answer to a question and won't even say thanks after getting the answer and of course will never become actual customers.

account42 2y ago

This may blow your mind but you can have static pages AND a dynamic endpoint for form submission. You could even put such endpoints under a common directory, /cgi-bin/ perhaps.

makeitdouble 2y ago
Just let me put a blinking "under construction" gif on my form page while I'm trying to figure how this cgi thing works.