Geeklog Forums

This question is sort of a spinoff of another thread on changing the menu

http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=89019

but I decided to make it a new thread because my question isn't really about how to get the link into the menu, it's about what the link should do.

Some of this is based on my fuzzy memory of how things used to work, so I may be wrong about some details, but if I remember correctly:

Previous versions of Geeklog had a Contact link in the menu. It used the Geeklog Mailto user function to send mail to the site owner (basically a link to profiles.php?uid=2). This seems to be the method that the Geeklog site uses on its Support page.

There was apparently code in Geeklog to allow anonymous users to send mail to uid 2, even if the configuration was set to require login for the Email to User function. This allowed the Contact link to provide a way for anonymous users to contact the site owner, even if the couldn't contact any other users.

At some point, that Contact link disappeared from the menu. It was fairly easy to add it back via a Custom menu option. I think there may have been sample code to do this.

Use of the Captcha plugin prevented spambots from using the contact link from bombarding the owner with spam.

More recently, the special check for uid 2 seems to have been abandoned, so if login is required for the email user function, this method of contacting the site owner is no longer available to anonymous users.

When I first noticed this after an upgrade, I modified the code to add the uid2 check. But I decided I didn't want to go back and modify Geeklog code every time I upgraded to allow this. So I'm looking for another way.s

My first attempt was to just build a static page with a simple form, and use the php mail function to send mail to my address, and check the "add to menu" checkbox as Dirk suggested in the other thread. I hoped this wouldn't get hit by spambots. I was wrong.

So far, the spam level hasn't been terrible. A few messages per week. The messages seem to have a similar format, a bunch of garbage characters with links to non-existent domains. I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish.

Before it gets worse, I need to find a better way. Since captcha did a pretty good job, that's what I'd like to use.

Does anybody have any hints on how to use the captcha plugin from a static page? Or some other way of allowing anonymous users to send mail to a specific user or address, protected by captcha? Or some other method I haven't thought of?

Why didn't you use an autotag for the forum link?

The autotags are useless if no one uses them.

Your feature suggestion seems like a good idea to me and it is not a big change. If I were you I would make a feature request and talk to Dirk about it and see what he thinks.

If you are willing to submit the code changes to incorporate the feature you could probably get it into Geeklogs next release.

Remember you would need to not only code the change but add in a new config option (or modify the current "E-Mail User Login Required?" config option) to include an option to enable or disable anonymous users from contacting Admin, plus the install and upgrade code to add this config option to Geeklog.


Tom

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

I don't think there was ever any special code for uid 2. IIRC, the option to block anonymous users from the email form was introduced at some point and being able to use it as a contact form (while blocking it from anon users) was lost at that point.

Opening up the form again (despite the blocking) would certainly be a useful feature. It shouldn't be bound to uid 2, though. Not sure what's the best way to implement it. Maybe make it a per-user option: "allow email from anonymous users".

If you'd be willing to code it, you're welcome to give it a try. If you're not a coder, make sure to at least submit a feature request on our bugtracker.

bye, Dirk

Hmmm .... as I said, my memory might be faulty.

I never actually saw a check for UID 2 in the code, because I didn't start digging into the code until I realized users couldn't contact me any more. So at that point it obviously wasn't there, regardless of whether it had been in the past.

I know that users were able to contact me in the past, and now they're not. I thought it was due to changes in Geeklog at some upgrade. But it's possible that maybe I had the email user function enabled for anonymous users at some point, and then disabled it. That conflicts with my memory of being pleasantly surprised when I discovered that guests could contact me even though the email users function was restricted. But maybe I didn't really discover that. Maybe I just thought I did.

I'm not familiar enough with PHP and Geeklog to code this myself and be sure I wasn't breaking something else. I'll put in a feature request. Thanks for the reply.