This question is sort of a spinoff of another thread on changing the menu
http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=89019
but I decided to make it a new thread because my question isn't really about how to get the link into the menu, it's about what the link should do.
Some of this is based on my fuzzy memory of how things used to work, so I may be wrong about some details, but if I remember correctly:
Previous versions of Geeklog had a Contact link in the menu. It used the Geeklog Mailto user function to send mail to the site owner (basically a link to profiles.php?uid=2). This seems to be the method that the Geeklog site uses on its Support page.
There was apparently code in Geeklog to allow anonymous users to send mail to uid 2, even if the configuration was set to require login for the Email to User function. This allowed the Contact link to provide a way for anonymous users to contact the site owner, even if the couldn't contact any other users.
At some point, that Contact link disappeared from the menu. It was fairly easy to add it back via a Custom menu option. I think there may have been sample code to do this.
Use of the Captcha plugin prevented spambots from using the contact link from bombarding the owner with spam.
More recently, the special check for uid 2 seems to have been abandoned, so if login is required for the email user function, this method of contacting the site owner is no longer available to anonymous users.
When I first noticed this after an upgrade, I modified the code to add the uid2 check. But I decided I didn't want to go back and modify Geeklog code every time I upgraded to allow this. So I'm looking for another way.s
My first attempt was to just build a static page with a simple form, and use the php mail function to send mail to my address, and check the "add to menu" checkbox as Dirk suggested in the other thread. I hoped this wouldn't get hit by spambots. I was wrong.
So far, the spam level hasn't been terrible. A few messages per week. The messages seem to have a similar format, a bunch of garbage characters with links to non-existent domains. I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish.
Before it gets worse, I need to find a better way. Since captcha did a pretty good job, that's what I'd like to use.
Does anybody have any hints on how to use the captcha plugin from a static page? Or some other way of allowing anonymous users to send mail to a specific user or address, protected by captcha? Or some other method I haven't thought of?