this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
24 points (96.2% liked)

Selfhosted

53652 readers
514 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I am moving my personal web site from netlify to a VPS. It runs via Caddy as just a plain, static web site generated from Hugo. Netlify offered a free contact form, but now I need to provide my own solution, somehow.

I'd like to self-host that too, if possible, on the VPS but then I need to handle spam blocking, form validation, possibly capcha, and sending the outbound email myself - and I don't have experience doing any of that. An AI chatbot suggested a python script using flask but I would still need to do a bunch to make that work, I think.

There are a number of form handling cloud services online (such as staticforms dot xyz) but then the form submissions are going through their servers. My visitors probably wouldn't care, but I would still prefer to self-host something, if it's not too hard to setup.

What do you all recommend? Anyone find a clever solution to this already?

I already have a "comments" feature wired into the site - I could just stick with that but some people seem to still prefer to contact me directly, instead of using that.

EDIT: This is all done - thanks for all the great ideas, you all rock!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

the form itself is easy, it's the bot detection and spam prevention that's hard. on my own sites, i've given-in and use the highest-level recaptcha, a hidden form field triggered by bots but not humans, and a server-side script for the mailing that also has some spam detection routines. they still get through, but far less often than a naked form would.

if you're satisfied with your existing comments function, can you simply enable comments on your 'contact' page and hide them from public view?

[–] perishthethought@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago

if you’re satisfied with your existing comments function, can you simply enable comments on your ‘contact’ page and hide them from public view?

I was also struggling with DNS issues all day so this is what I am putting in place for now. Yah, good enough is good enough. Thanks for the idea.