Contactify - trying to prevent comment spam

Contactify is a new service that is supposed to allow people to contact you while hiding your email address, and thus preventing comment spam.

I say supposed to, because I’m having trouble figuring out what the advantage of the service is. Here’s a play-by-play of my experience:

Went to website and signed up with their “Super Fast Sign-Up Box.” It really is super fast, only that once I entered my info, my link did not appear, “like magic,” as it was supposed to. Nothing actually happened on the site. I did soon receive a confirmation email telling me to click on a link to confirm my subscription, and also telling me what my link number was. I clicked on the link.
I got a notice on the Contactify site that my subscription has succeeded. But I still couldn’t find my contact form.
On the main page, there was a link to an example contact form, with the following format: http://www.contactify.com/1. I replaced the 1 with the link number I had received in the email, and found my contact form.
So it seems that the form is not something you can embed on your site. I guess you’re supposed to provide a link on your site that says something like “Contact Us” and links to your Contactify form. This is a drawback since it takes people who are trying to contact you and are interested in you and your site – to another site!
Now that I had found my form, I decided to send myself a test message with my form. Everything was fine until I got to the Captcha numbers. I couldn’t read them! I entered them once, and was told I was wrong. The numbers changed and I tried again. Wrong. I clicked on “can’t read code,” but the numbers would change no more. I was told I needed to activate cookies.
Finally I managed to send myself a comment. The results were very basic, i.e. Sender Name: John Doe; Sender Email Address: johndoe@gmail.com and then the message.

As far as I know, when you install one of the WordPress comment forms, your email address is hidden. These forms are easy to use, and the ones that use Captchas are humanly possible to read. Contactify is in beta, so maybe they will improve, but in the meantime it seems like it’s not worth using their service. If their service does have advantages that I’ve missed, they really should improve the copy on their site so that it comes across to visitors.

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Loren Bliss

I had exactly the same experience described above, but nearly three years after the above post — it is now 9 Feb 2010 — so it is obvious Contactify has not improved a bit. Moreover, if one enables cookies to the extent Contactify apparently demands, one opens oneself to the very deluge of garbage mail Contactify claims to be designed to prevent, so what we may have here is a marketing wolf in shepherd’s clothing. Caveat emptor — even (or perhaps especially) when the product is free.///
neil macowan

I am trying to contact a service provider using the Contactify link on th this supplier’s website. The problem is that when I click to send the message, there is nothing to indicate that it has been sent. I believe the link may be dead, at least from my computer. When I try to use the Contactify website link to enquire about this issue, it seems that the only way to do it is through Outlook, which I abhor and never use it I can avoid it, preferring to rely instead on free webmail sites which do not require Outlook being configured on my PC. So, I am unable to contact them and feel I have wasted at least an hour of my time on this. Poor show.

Contactify – trying to prevent comment spam

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