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4 Ways I'd Make Wufoo Even More Awesome
We’ve been rolling out Wufoo forms across campus as our form creation and management tool of choice. It’s much more robust than the FormBuilder platform we built back in 2005, which is important, as I find myself with less and less time to spend supporting legacy web apps.
Wufoo is very full featured, with a robust API, a myriad of reporting options an several embedding options. We’ve been using it quite a bit as part of recruitment communications to customize and personalize forms as well as emails back to a user when they complete a form, which is really handy.
When we’ve had a support question or issue, it’s been answered and addressed quickly, which is nice.
So I’m 100% down with Wufoo, but I find myself wanting a few things that would take it to the next level.
1. Let me bring my own storage
At the level we’re at (the carpe diem plan at $69 a month), giving us only 3GB of storage is pretty silly. That amount of storage costs less than a dollar at any of the cloud storage services. Please, Wufoo, let me connect easily with my Amazon S3 account, where I could store as many files as possible and worry about the cost myself. I can think of a few forms where we’re asking people to upload a hi-res photo, and if a few hundred people fill out that form at a time, we could potentially get close to the limit. This should be a trivial fix.
2. Pagination
For surveys and other longer forms, it’d be really swell to break a form up across several pages. We have some applications and surveys that are so long I fear users see how long they have to scroll until they reach the end and they give up and go away. But a break in there would be nice.
3. Conditional Questions
The ability to ask a follow-up question only if a user selected a certain option in a checkbox or radio field would be nice. We’re getting this question quite a bit from people on campus.
4. A level between “Carpe Diem” and “Ad Infinitum”
It feels like there really should be one more level between their Carpe Diem plan (20 users, 3GB, 15,000 entries a month, $69.95/mo) and their Ad Infinitium plan (60 users, 10GB, 100,000 entries, $199.95/mo). We need about 40 users to cover everyone across campus. It’d be nice if there was a $99 or $129 plan where I could get 40 users, 6GB and 50,000 entries.
Wufoo, keep on keeping on. We’re huge fans of your service and so are our campus users.
Update from Wufoo::
Exterminating Form Spam
In 2005, we launched a web application for our campus that allows our users, especially those with no technical knowledge, to produce web forms.
Why did we do this? Mostly, we did it because everyone always wanted a form and my group had to build them all. We had been using the ancient FormMail.pl but each receipient had to be approved and each form hand-coded with required fields. I wanted users to be able to create forms, have the results emailed to them as well as saved in a database, and manage those forms, all without having to get the web team involved.
I know, web forms aren’t sexy. Not in the least, but they’re a critical part of how people communicate with us on our sites. Since it’s launch, FormBuilder (original name, I know) has really made an impact across campus. Forms are all uniform in terms of style and layout. This was a huge problem, as everyone, myself included, was building forms differently. Offices on campus can create a form in just a few minutes, email the address or post it on the web and start getting responses in minutes. These offices have seem a dramatic improvement in student responses and program attendance.
So FormBuilder’s been chugging along with no problems, until recently when it’s been getting hammered with spam. Not all forms are getting hit, just a lucky few. They are receving, seriously, hundreds of submissions a day. Luckily, it’s mostly gibberish and not pr0n spam, but still, it’s annoying for my users and it’s using my resources up. Not cool.
I wrestled for a long time with how to stop the spam. I thought about adding some kind of question that would be appended to each form, such as “What is 2+2,” or something to that effect. I thought about using code like Bad Behavior, but I don’t know if that would be easily defeated.
In the end, I decided to implement the dreaded CAPTCHA.
I looked at code to generate my own and do all the processing on my server. I struggled with getting them to be readable and getting them to fit in with the look and feel of our forms. After running into so many problems, I decided to use the reCAPTCHA service.
reCaptcha was developed by Carnegie Mellon University, and, in addition to reducing spam, the project helps digitize books from the Internet Archive. In my eyes, that’s a win-win. ReCaptcha allows users to reload the images if they are tough to read, and they also allow for users to hear a series of numbers that they enter instead of words. Listen to the numbers sometime, it’s a little creepy.
ReCaptcha is being used on a great deal of large websites, including Twitter, StumbleUpon and Ticketmaster, to name but a few. I’m sure you’ve seen the red reCaptcha boxes as you’ve surfed the web.
Implementing reCaptcha was painless. They offer libraries in a variety of languages and detailed instructions. I used the PHP code and it’s worked perfectly. What really drew me to the service is the fact that you can really customize the look and feel of the captcha to match your color scheme.
Here’s a standard reCaptcha box:
Here’s an example from one of our FormBuilder powered forms:
Earlier this week, we rolled this out on all FormBuilder-powered forms. It was smooth and other then a call to our computing help desk by a user who feared we’d been hacked, we haven’t heard any issues from people filling out forms or from our campus users.
Thus far, the spamming has stopped and only legitimate form entries are getting through. Of course, it will only be a matter of time until hackers beat ReCaptcha, and the whole cat and mouse game will start again.
