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Kontactr - Web contact forms

UPDATE: Kontactr has a TOS and Privacy Policy now, both of which read very well. They also have an AJAX-based contact form under development - looking forward to seeing its finished state!

Anyone that’s been a regular reader here knows that I’ve had non-stop problems getting my “Contact Me” page to function properly. Wordpress plugins haven’t worked, I’ve had flaky email, the works. So - I was happy to get an email in my inbox from Shrihari Sankaran (contact Shrihari here) pointing me to Kontactr - one of a number of new “contact form services” that have popped up as of late.

Kontactr and similar services (none of who’s names I can recall at the moment) let you create a simple contact form. When filled out, the contents are forwarded to your email address. This offers a number of advantages:

1. Re-use: you can paste the same “contact widget” code on any number of your sites.
2. Centralized Admin: Following from the above point, you can change your contact email address at all of your sites in a single edit, as opposed to having to switch each manually
3. Increased Privacy / Reduced Spam: No need to publish your email address where the web can parse it. Add in a captcha to cut out spammers, and you’re good to go.

These are three compelling sources of value, especially for people with multiple blogs, websites, whatever online - centralization is a great way to minimize your administrative overhead.

Kontactr does a good job of making the service work, and making setup and deployment very simple. They miss my boat by not having a Privacy / Data Retention Policy or SLA (see “Legal Considerations” below), but otherwise have a good early-release effort. Registration & setup are simultaneous and take place in a single, simple form:

Once you’re set up and logged in, you can copy and paste widget code to your sites, or link back to a contact form on Kontactr using any of the buttons/badges provided. You can also configure a “redirect” page for your contact form to point to after submission.

Overall Kontactr’s execution is clean and competent, though with a few rough edges.

1. Make registration smoother: Registering for Kontactr involves email validation and a forced sign in after that email validation. Given the quick and simple nature of the service, I’d say skip the email validation entirely, and just shoot people from the registration form right to their contact form code. The fewer steps between the user and their goal the better. Another possibility would be to have the option to ditch registration entirely and just create a unique-but-disposable user id tied to a form and an entered email address - that would be even faster.
2. Streamline the “Redirect”: Having to configure a redirect page for the form to go to after a submission makes deploying the widget across multiple sites awkward - I don’t want one site redirecting to a thank-you form on another. Nor do I necessarily want distinct widgets and configuration settings for each site. How about doing a Flash or JavaScript/AJAX widget that handles the submission “in situ,” displaying a generic thank-you message on the same page as the form?
3. Styling & the Nature of Widget Code: The widget code, being straight-up HTML, makes customization easy, as you can edit it on a case by case basis. I’d really rather have the widget code as a simple embed, however, rather than a batch of HTML, so that any changes to the widget propogate to all of my sites without the need to manually re-copy & paste the code to each site. This approach suggests styling should be performed on the Kontactr website too - I’d recommend that Kontactr take a look at the way Feedburner handles creating and deploying their subscription count widget.

Legal Considerations

Final, most important question: Privacy & Security. If the content’s of my Contact Form are flowing through Kontactr, I want a privacy policy, and more knowledge about the team behind the tool. That’s the only reason I’m not using Kontactr on TechFold right now: No privacy policy or disclosure about security practices, data retention, etc. An uptime guarantee or some form of SLA (service level agreement) wouldn’t be remiss either…

I think Kontactr also wants Privacy and T&C documents in place to protect themselves; if someone sends me a critical message through my contact form that doesn’t arrive because of a service outage, are they liable for any damages I suffer as a result?

In Summary

Kontactr is good, and the concept of centralized contact administration certainly has merit. But, Kontactr has opportunities to streamline registration and administration, and needs to plug legal holes. In a nutshell, Kontactr shows the signs of being a pre-release product from a new team - lots of good, with some work left to do.

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