How do I determine when and by whom

[blarew]

How do I determine when and by whom a comment was submitted via a form (free-form text) created using FrontPage? I added a form to my web page to allow visitors to submit comments and questions. I ended up removing it because I had no way of knowing who submitted a comment (or when) and therefore, could not respond. Thanks.

blarew@iupui.edu

 

[Craigieboy]

Were you being alerted in some way when suggestions were made by your visitors... by email perhaps?

If it was email then you could just use the date/time stamp and From address from the mail to keep tabs on who was doing the sending. You'll never stop bogus mail arriving, however you can restrict junk a little by adding some client side validation to your form, ie. over the email address, etc.

I generally send all form data (particularly client feedback) to a database so that I have a permanent store. If you are unsure about connecting to and updating a database from a web page go to

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com

for some good tutorials. I would then kick off an email to alert me of the user feedback. To do this I would use ASP and a little ASP component called JMail or ASPMail (depending what your ISP allows).

Of course this is assuming that your ISP supports SQL, or at very least ODBD for Access databases, Active Server Pages and ASP components such as ASPMail.

There are a few other ways to take care of this, using CGI for example, but this is the way I would do it. Which ever way you attempt it the best results will generally require some programming.

Hope this is a pointer in the right direction for you.

Craig

 

[blarew]

Thanks for the information. The user comments were being saved to a results page, which I would check periodically because I didn't have it set to notify me. I will set it up to store the info in a DB with e-mail notification as you suggested. Thanks for your help.

-Barb