tell a friend......

hi

I'd like to set up a 'tell a friend' page

e.g. http://www.affiliatehq.net/tell-a-friend/

so that users of the site can fill out a form with a few e-mail addresses to recommend the site to friends/collegues, etc.

does anybody have any clues as to how you would go about setting up something like this yourself?

having looked at the ones on offer i have two problems with them -

firstly the ones that you have to pay for - really i'm not about to give over my card details to an unknown entity... Amazon for a book, no worries - Joe Bloggs for something like this - NO WAY HOZAY

secondly those that do it for free are directed through their smtp = advertising plus who knows who they'll sell the addresses to (which doesn't fit too well with our privacy policy!!)

So i'd like to set it up for myself if it isn't too difficult....

thanks for any ideas,

jim

PHP is one way to do it, there's tonnes of resources with free scripts that you could either plug and play with or customise to your own spec.

forgot to say, with PHP and your webhosts sendmail you don't have to worry about the integrity of your data which is always a bonus!

hth

ASP can do it too.....you need a mailer on your server, (jmail is an example, which is free, but ask you web hosting for details of the mailer they support and documentaions), there you can start a message with the subject, body, etc and send it to that friend...its quite easy

thanks you to both of you for your suggestions.....

i am starting the process of learning php and mysql before i take that any further now

jim

www.bravenet.com, i used that and i think it worked,

"i used that and think it worked" is not really a stunning testimonial in my eyes. i'd say steer well clear of things like bravenet and remotely hosted scripts if you want control of how your script operates and equally important, control over the data.

would you really trust a remote site with the email address of people who've been by yours, i know i'd be pissed off it someone put my email into a site and i subsequently got spammed.

billybonds, a couple of weeks have passed since you said you were gonna use php and mysql to do this, how you getting on with it?

sorry well it did work, but you are right you can get spammed, but it depends how many people you tell your email too right?

hi

andymoo: i haven't really started yet. i've bought a book on php and mysql and had a little look but really i've been concentrating on learning and converting the sites to CSS (which i now officially LOVE with all of my heart!!). Nearly done with that now so I'll be moving on to this soon...

jim

There's a bit of a learning curve with PHP but it's surmountable. By all means, don't trust your visitors email addys and other info with third parties.

Hi,

flashgc is right. You should check the e-mail addresses.

And you also should prevent the abuse of your script. Be aware of the fact that you let the user input sender and recipient. With that he is able to send as much e-mails to as much recipients as he wants. Same applies to the e-mail content.

You should check the referring site to make sure that only visitors from your site can access the script. Another nice feature would be to log the e-mails and check how many e-mails has been send from a single IP address or with a single e-mail address as sender.

In any event good luck for you.

NN

thanks guys!

i have pretty much finished with switching everything to CSS now so i guess i'll be tackling this in the v. near future!!

jim