I have one of those "tell a friend" forms on one of my sites, where the user can send an email to a friend recommending my site. Is this even necessary now days with all of the Social Bookmarking and stuff? I'm considering taking it down. What are your opinions on "Tell-a-friend"? Yes or No?
Yes! Because once the form is up, you don't have to do anything more to it. And it doesn't hurt anything, right? Just put it right in front of them. Here is mine, for example... http://www.thelist.fm/Quick-Dating-Tip.shtml The only exception is if your page is too busy for it.
Careful with tell a friend contact pages in a site. Things such as firebug which is a firefox plugin you can alter html and most dishonest people will in turn use it as a means to send spam from your server and even hijack your form and use it for spamming others.
Eh, screw it. They can't get into my programming, and if they use it to spam, does it really make a difference where the form is, be it in front of them or on another page? And it dosn't make sense that they would anyway, with so many mail accounts through Yahoo and Google that can be created. Maybe I am missing something?
it doesn't hurt at all. keep it there. it's true that social bookmarking is really good, but if you have "tell a friend" form, you can get other traffic too.
I was simply trying to point out what has started to become quite a known fact of how certain people are exploiting code. Do as you please and use it however you like.
no problem. Want to point out that if you don't store the send data in the same file and have it page the file with your data and make it where the sending to from is checked then this will bypass the possible spammers and phishers looking for mailing addresses. TJ
I'm just wondering if people still use it now days. I don't have any sort of analytics to my refer-a-friend script.
All you need is a simple code in it's HTML that tells you how many times it has been used. Find a cheap college guy who can help you.
TAF is still a useful tool. I have it on my main site and there is at least 1 or 2 people/day, sometimes up to 10 or more "telling their friends" - To me, the 1 or 2 (or 10) is not many, but over a year it certainly adds up. No matter what, I use everything I can to make it easy for my site visitors to promote my site - and for the sake of a simple form that hardly takes up any room on my site, I'll leave it there.