myContactForm.com - Help Forum

[usebob]

I am looking to create a survey for our next 100 plus customers and I am wondering with the premium membership, what sort of security do you offer? How can I be sure that non customers are not going to fill out the survey and taint our data b/c we are offering an incentive?

There are a lot of coupon/freebie websites that post links to anything that provides discounts or coupons codes etc. Do you have a security apparatus that prevents webcrawlers from finding and accessing discounts/coupon codes?

Thanks!

Mike

[mycontac]

I'm sorry, but there is nothing on our end that could be done to prevent crawlers from accessing and indexing your site, or to prevent unwanted people from accessing your form. Any sort of security would have to be implemented on your server's end through some sort of user authentication system (the most simple would probably be .htaccess if you're running an Apache server). One thing that could be done to prevent indexing by the major search engines would be to create a robots.txt file to prevent indexing (all the reputable search engines obey this). In addition, if you do not link to the survey off of another website and instead simply email out the URL, it is highly unlikely that it would ever get indexed.

Sincerely,

Nick Ladd
myContactForm.com

[usebob]

Nick,

Thanks for your prompt reply, I appreciate it!

So if I were to individually email the survey link, you will create for us, to each of our customers there is little chance that the survey URL will be indexed therefore compromising our data? While a bit manual it does sound like a secure option.

Your thoughts?

Mike

[mycontac]

Yes, so long as that URL is not linked off of any website, you will be safe from being indexed. As a precaution however, I would create a robots.txt file simply to ensure that reputable search engines won't index the page. Also, you run a bit of a risk of this thing getting into the wild if the people you email the link to forward it on to other people and someone ends up posting the link somewhere.

Sincerely,

Nick Ladd
myContactForm.com