In these days when automated web crawlers are common inhabitants of the Internet and form-spam is rampant, website administrators are searching everywhere for technology that will help separate the robots on their sites from the real people.  Robots, spiders, worms and hackers are all working hard to find new ways to exploit forms on websites, attempting to submit invalid information in an effort to break into secure systems, or even simply spam the website administrators to promote their products.

We have all seen the additional security measures people have put in place in an attempt to block the unwanted spammers, while still allowing their clients easy access to send in information.  Unfortunately, most of these systems are complicated to use, adding extra work and frustration for the client, such as requiring the person to read letters on a multi-colored graphic and type them into the form.  Then, if you miss a letter or type something in wrong, you have to start over from the beginning.

In FormBuilder, we have installed what we call a “Reverse CAPTCHA“.  Simply put, it keeps the spiders out, while allowing real people in without making their lives any more difficult.

How to Use:

To find and activate the Reverse CAPTCHA controls, go to the FormBuilder interface on your blog, and click to edit one of your forms.  When creating new fields on the form, you will see that one of the FIELD TYPE’s in the dropdown box is “spam blocker”.  Simply select that option as your field type and give it a name.  (something you wouldn’t use on that particular form.. ie. BIRTH_DATE)

The idea of this field is that it is hidden to regular users of your site, so when the form is submitted by a REAL user, the value of that field should be blank.  However, spiders and automated form hacking scripts would see that field and attempt to submit information to it.  If information is submitted in that field, the entire form submission will be ignored, resulting in less spam in your in-box.

For additional spam prevention, you can rename the CSS which is used to identify this FormBuilder Field.  This should help prevent robots from locking on to a particular CSS field and ignoring forms which are labelled with it.  To rename the CSS field, go to your main FormBuilder management page, and change the field value under the Spam Blocker heading.

We are very excited to announce the release of FormBuilder 0.60, featuring many new features you have been requesting.  Here’s a brief run-down:

• Feature: Internationalization Support
  We have incorporated the ability to support internationalization on the forms you now create.  This included numerous database updates as well as code modifications.  See further notes on this below.
• Feature: New Field Type: Followup URL
  Allows you to redirect visitors to an alternate URL in the event that the form is filled out successfully.
• Feature: Duplicate Form Checking
  The plugin will now keep track of the most recently submitted form data, preventing the exact same information from being submitted again from the same IP.
• Feature: Redirect ONLY Module
  Added a new module (found in the ACTION field of the form) which allows the form to simply redirect the user to another page, rather than actually submitting form data or sending an email.  Useful to add a quick button to a page, in order to redirect users somewhere else.
• Bug Fix: WordPress in a Subdirectory
  Previously FormBuilder was experiencing problems when installed on a WordPress site in a subdirectory of the document root. (ie www.yourdomain.com/blog/wordpress)  This bug has now been fixed, and FormBuilder should work well regardless of where in the filesystem WordPress is installed.
• Bug Fix: Prototype.js Library
  FormBuilder has been reconfigured to use the WordPress built-in prototype.js library, rather than including it’s own.  Should help to provide better compatibility with other plugins which may use the same library.

Important Notes:

The introduction of internationalization support in the FormBuilder plugin resulted in some unexpected consequences due to bugs found in PHP version 4.xx.  In certain situations, PHP warnings will be displayed on the form when non-ascii characters are used.  This is actually due to a bug in PHP v. 4.xx and is not resolved until PHP version 5.xx.  The warning in question looks like this:

Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode()! in /var/www/yourdomain.com/htdocs/blog/wp-content/plugins/formbuilder/formbuilder.php on line 379

Unfortunately, because of the fact that this is a PHP error, there is not a lot we can do to resolve it.  More details can be found here.  If you are experiencing this error, we suggest the following solutions:

• Install or activate PHP 5.xx
  As your website host to upgrade your version of PHP to 5.xx.  As of July 13, PHP 4 is becoming obsolete and PHP 6 is soon to arrive.
• Disable warning notifications on your site
  While the warnings will still exist, they will not display on your pages.

We hope you like the improvements and we would love to hear any feedback you might have.

Click here to download FormBuilder from the WordPress Plugin Database.

This version of FormBuilder fixes a couple bugs in the way FormBuilder functions, which may have been affecting some users. The fixed bugs are as follows:

• Added “action” field to form HTML to comply more fully with HTML spec. Details of the spec requirements can be found here: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
• Renamed the “additional_styles.css” file to be “additional_styles.sample.css” in order that customized styles in the file are not overwritten when upgrading to new versions of FormBuilder.

We hope you like the improvements and we would love to hear any feedback you might have.

Click here to download FormBuilder from the WordPress Plugin Database.

FormBuilder version 0.57 is released to repair bugs introduced by WordPress v. 2.5.  We HIGHLY recommend you upgrade to this version before upgrading to WordPress 2.5.

We have also included a number of other cool features including the following:

• The ability to uninstall the plugin if necessary.
• Changed required fields to be bold instead of red by default.
• Linked checkboxes and radio buttons to their labels, making them clickable.
• Added ability to create customized submit buttons and submit button images anywhere in the form.
• And last but not least, we are now hosting the FormBuilder code on the WordPress Plugin Database.

We hope you like the improvements and we would love to hear any feedback you might have.

Click here to download FormBuilder from the WordPress Plugin Database.

Using the March 10th nightly has shown that there are some issues with FormBuilder. We will be working on getting a new version of Formbuilder out as soon as 2.5 stable is released.

We are also excited to release the update with a couple of new features as well, so it feels like an upgrade and not a bug fix.