Developing eWrite

I’ve had eWrite Forms running for a good few months now. In short, it’s a service which allows a website owner to replace any form on their site which is being abused by spam messages with a form protected against spam.

It was basic, providing only a few forms. A newsletter signup form, a contact form and a guestbook form. It also needed a website to use PHP on their site to allow them to integrate a form.

This was clearly quite limiting and I’ve been planning up updating this for some time. This week I was supposed to travel for a few days. Partly in relation to work and also to take a day or so for myself for some well deserved rest away from the computer.

Instead, I had an idea to stay home and try to catch up on a couple of projects. I spent a couple of days giving eWrite Forms some attention.

It now allows a user to sign up (for free) and easily create basic forms simply by ticking a few fields which they want to use.

They are provided with a short snippet of Javascript which they place on their site to display the form. The Javascript is much the same as the JS used by Polldaddy to embed Polls and Surveys on a site.

A user can create as many forms as they like. Any form they create is monitored by eWrite forms and prevents it from sending spam to the website owner using plenty of techniques including a users personal white list and a personal black list.

A user gets an email each week showing how many messages passed through the system and how many of them were spam. The legitimate messages pass through to the user as normal and the spam messages are stored in an admin panel where the user can log in at any time to review and release messages if needed. They can also customize the look of their forms using CSS to make it fit in with their site design.

Im especially pleased with these improvements but theres plenty more to add to it. I’d like to charge a small amount for this service, but Im unsure whats an acceptable price.

Some improvements underway are:

• A paid version which will send the form to the owner instantly (The current messages are scanned hourly)
• An RSS feed of messages received from a form.
• A way for the owner to customize the ‘thank you’ message when a form is submitted
• The ability to add any type of field a user wants to a form
• Better Javascript form validation.
• Import/export of emails addresses to and from the white list and black lists

Any ideas or suggestions from bloggers out there? Know anyone that has a website with a form thats sending them spam?