How I wish they were accessible to anonymous users!

I shouldn’t, but I take pride in the fact that for each of the five sites I’ve built with Drupal so far, I haven’t had to do any code hacks. The sites have been pure Drupal Core, plus common add-on modules. And the obvious CSS styling. I still haven’t had to learn how to use hooks.

And it’s really nice that it’s so easy to turn Drupal sites into membership sites. Built-in user management. Just turn on Contact Forms, and enable for each user, a personal contact form.

The problem is that the personal member contact forms are only accessible to other logged in members. Anonymous browsers get an “access denied” page.

There are heaps of people on the Drupal forums who want this. But the standard answer is “it’s by design”.

There are threads with detailed code hacks and patches. And I just don’t have time to do them. All I want (and many others want) is the ability to allow members on a site to be contacted without showing their email address in the clear. Just asking to be harvested by spammers.

So on my latest site A Healthy Business I wanted members to have their own pages with contact forms. Experimented with several options. And came back, semi-reluctantly, to using iContact signup forms.

They look handsome. And I know I should be using an autoresponder anyway, to be efficient, which is available through iContact.

I was just a little hesitant. I found iContact a little non-intuitive to setup. To get the effect I wanted on my personal page, with an embedded contact page, I had to setup a List on iContact. Then the autoresponder. Then the campaign. Then the signup form. Create the thank you page on my site (optional, but preferable). It really shouldn’t take that many steps. And I did want to have extra custom fields on my form, but I couldn’t see where to do that.

It should be easier.

I unsubscribed from someone else’s list today. He only ever sends ads for internet marketing products these days, using pretty weak attempts at controversial headlines. They’re so bad, I can’t remember the last time I read one of his emails. So I looked for the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

His list was managed by icontact, who I’ve just started using.

But the screen that pops up, to allow me to unsubscribe, contains a list of his email subscription lists.
Apparently I was on the list called:

Desperate_For_Money_Buyers_Old

Not very flattering. If that’s how he thinks of his subscribers, he’s now guaranteed that I won’t ever join a list from him again, no matter what freebie he offers.

I guess that’s a tip to make sure that your internal list names are nice.