The Referer header lies to you about where a form was submitted
Every stored referrer was the bare origin, never the page. Here's why, and the one-line fix that isn't really about form backends at all.
WebForms5 min read
Blog
Notes from building WebForms.
Real bugs found, real decisions made, real tradeoffs taken - with the actual reasoning, not the announcement-post version of it.
Your password reset email and your contact-form notification should never share a sender address
Two very different kinds of email were sharing one sending reputation. Splitting them was a fifteen-minute change with an outsized effect on deliverability risk.
WebForms4 min readWe could have shipped 40 more integrations. We shipped routing rules instead.
A longer integration list is an easy feature to announce and a genuinely weak one to actually use. Here's what we built instead and why.
WebForms6 min readWe had a column called quota_reset_at. Nothing ever wrote to it.
A schema column can describe a promise perfectly and still not keep it. Here's the bug, and the boring-on-purpose fix.
WebForms4 min readA Google Sheets form pipeline without Google Forms
Your form, your styling, and still a spreadsheet at the end. The Apps Script route, start to finish.
WebForms6 min readGet a Slack ping for every form submission
Email is where submissions go to be read eventually. Slack is where they get answered in four minutes.
WebForms4 min readForm submission alerts on your phone via Telegram
The cheapest push notification pipeline there is: a bot token, a chat ID, done.
WebForms4 min readTurn form submissions into Notion database rows
Your contact form becomes the intake end of a Notion pipeline your team already lives in.
WebForms5 min readA lightweight CRM in Airtable, fed by your contact form
Before you buy a CRM, try a base with three views and a form feeding it.
WebForms5 min readForm to email: the three ways, honestly compared
One of these is free and broken, one is a part-time job, one is what we sell. Here is the honest version of that sentence.
WebForms7 min readMigrating from Web3Forms: the complete field-by-field guide
Change one attribute, rename a few hidden inputs, and keep everything your form already does. The full mapping, including the fields that behave differently.
WebForms7 min readMigrating from Formspree: fields, redirects and the gotchas
The honeypot field keeps its exact name, the subject field gains an underscore, and the redirect moves out of the paid tier and into your markup.
WebForms6 min readMigrating from FormSubmit: every underscore field mapped
FormSubmit put your email address in the form's action attribute. Moving off it means mapping nine underscore fields - four rename, five move into a dashboard.
WebForms7 min readMigrating from Netlify Forms: from build-time magic to a plain POST
Netlify Forms works by scanning your HTML at deploy time. Untangling from that means deleting attributes, not adding them - and framework forms get simpler, not harder.
WebForms6 min readWhy our spam filter quarantines instead of deleting - and how it learns
A real spam incident, the threshold math that let it through, and the design rule that came out of it: never destroy a submission on a machine's say-so.
WebForms8 min readTypeform to Airtable without Zapier: the native way and the simpler way
Half the searches for this add Zapier out of habit. You don't need it - and depending on what you're building, you may not need Typeform either.
WebForms6 min readNetlify Forms' 100-submission limit is gone. Here's what replaced it
Half the advice about Netlify Forms online is about a pricing cliff that no longer exists. Here is the current state, verified against their pricing and docs, and the limits that remain.
WebForms6 min read