TOPIC:

I would like the contact us form to include a box for a phone number. People have been gravitating away from email and toward texting for some time now, and I like to actually call prospects who contact us.

Curiously, the email I receive from the Contact Us form includes a row for a phone number, which, unsurprisingly, is always blank, because the form makes no provision for providing it. For simplicity sake, I think the confirm email address box is unnecessary and could be replaced with a phone number request box.

Thanks.

The phone number box is right there on the form - next to the name
The club contacts can also have their phone numbers show on the form by checking "This member will accept prospect phone calls" in the Contact Us Form settings

Thanks for the insight. I fiddled with the settings and found that the contact form enables the phone box only if I enable and display at least one of our phone numbers as a contact. Otherwise, the phone box disappears and the name box extends over the two-column width.

I'm not crazy about advertising my name and phone number publicly, but I visited several other FTH sites and see that many of them display as many as three of their club member contacts. Several others display as mine, with no phone number offered or requested. It feels a bit exposed and seems an odd prerequisite for enabling the phone entry box. Do you know why the phone box is displayed conditionally rather than as the universal default? 

Interesting - and well figured out.  I think that is a recent change, as I am pretty sure we've been getting phone numbers from contacts in one of the clubs I belong to that doesn't share the contact numbers. 
I'm hoping our developer will chime in here.

Pam wrote:

Interesting - and well figured out.  I think that is a recent change, as I am pretty sure we've been getting phone numbers from contacts in one of the clubs I belong to that doesn't share the contact numbers. 
I'm hoping our developer will chime in here.

Sorry, incorrect.  This is as designed and is how it has always been since before when I became the developer. The history of this pre-dates me, but I suspect that there was a good reason for setting it up this way, so I have not ever changed it.   Brian may be able to chime in on the history and original reasoning.

Not recent; it's been that way for years. It never occurred to me that I could change it until our recent exchange. I'll be curious what the developers say.

peterb323 wrote:

Not recent; it's been that way for years. It never occurred to me that I could change it until our recent exchange. I'll be curious what the developers say.

I am "the developers".  See my post above.

Thanks Steve. The world has changed since the early days of FTH. I'm guessing the contact form originated in the days of landlines and expensive long distance calls and predates the security threats of the present day. The majority of club member phone numbers these days are cell phone numbers, and people, particularly women, are rightly protective of them.

I hope you might consider revisiting the current protocol, such as enabling the phone number box by default and perhaps replacing the individual contact names with their officer roles.

So you would expect potential prospects to provide a phone number while not providing a phone number for any of your club contacts?  I find that to be very problematic.  

Additionally, with the GDPR considerations taken into account, you might find a very different take on this in the EU than here.

If you are really concerned about providing a club contact number that works while hiding your club officer's phone numbers, then you should consider just getting a Google Voice Number (or similar) for your club and set it to forward calls to the officer of your choice.  Then you can create a dummy member having that Google Voice number and the archive email address and select that dummy member as a club contact so that number is shown.

I didn’t expect a debate here, but I don’t see this as very problematic.

First of all, the phone field is optional. No one expects anyone to provide any information they don’t want to.

Second, the method I propose is the way TMI handles it. The [contact club] link on Toastmasters.org requests name, phone, and email. TMI in return provides a contact phone number for the club, and it is optional. They do not provide the name associated with the number the way FTH does.

Your suggested work-around, creating a google voice number, is delegating security to the club level. Toastmasters clubs are not sophisticated organizations with IT specialists on staff. They are a ragtag band of volunteers who assume you, the FTH website provider, are looking out for them.

The current configuration creates asymmetrical risk. Club officers are exposing their name and number freely to the entire internet universe, and I suspect most club officers don’t even know their names are published.

I have not studied GDPR considerations, but I’m sure they don’t insist on every site providing a personal name and phone number in exchange for requesting a phone number from an interested party.

As of now, our only protection is that Toastmasters is a small organization that is not very interesting to bad actors. But, if someone with sinister intent did stumble on this FTH vulnerability, it would be a simple task to create a script to scrape every name and number off of the FTH platform. Then, it would be too late. 

I found a possible "work around."  I customized the Contact Us Form Greeting:

Thank you for reaching out to us! Use the form below to contact us and you will receive a reply by e-mail.
Please include your phone number in the body of *Your Message/Interested In. (optional) 

(By using 2 lines, and the bold text, it stands out a little more.)

Let's see it that works, for people that read, LOL.

Thanks Clare. Yes, that's an option, but you must admit it's inelegant. It would be preferable if the optional phone field was just always visible. I'm not sure why Mr. Steve is digging his heals in on this one, but it's his baby.
For the record, FTH is a fantastic service and I'm very grateful for it.