Last month, we highlighted bloggers writing about mental health issues — and it struck a chord with many of you.
Lots of you commented that you also write about struggles with mental health, and were hoping your blogs would be a medium to help you connect with others and a safe space for talking about sensitive issues. There are two features baked into WordPress.com to support both goals.
Contact forms
Unfortunately, there’s still a good deal of stigma around mental illness, making many of us uncomfortable being public about our struggles. Leaving a public comment on someone’s blog isn’t always easy on fun posts, let alone on something as fraught with judgement as mental health.
Putting a contact form on your blog gives readers a way to connect with you privately. They can share their own stories and offer support without having to reveal more than they’re comfortable with to the internet at large.
To insert a form into a post or page, click the “Add Contact Form” button at the top of the Visual or Text Editor to pull up the form builder, which looks like this:
You can edit the fields, delete them, or add more — it all depends on what you’d like your form to say and do. As you create the form, you’ll see a preview of it right in the form builder. When you’re satisfied, click “Add this form to my post.”
(Note: when you click “Add,” the form tool will convert your form to code and you won’t see the actual form in your editing window. Don’t worry, your form is there — to see it, save your post and preview it.)
In its simplest version, a contact form could simply provide space to input a name and note. You can even decide not to make fields like “name” required, to give people the option to be totally anonymous.
In the “Email Notifications” tab of the tool, you can set the email address you’d like to use to receive responses (the default is the address you use with WordPress.com). You can also review responses in your dashboard.
Using a contact form protects your privacy as well as your reader’s: if you blog anonymously or pseudonymously and would prefer not to list an email address on your blog, it allows readers to get in touch without revealing your identity.
Privacy settings
Sometimes, you need to write or have updates to share, but you’d only like family, friends, and/or regular readers to be able to view them. For these truly sensitive posts, take advantage of privacy settings.
You can set entire blogs to be private and password-protected, but you can also control access on a per-post basis by password-protecting individual posts. Head to the “Visibility” settings in the publish box (at left), select “Password protected,” pick a password, and give it to those you’d like to be able to see the post.
If you need to go further, the “Private” option makes the post invisible to all but WordPress.com users who are Administrators or Editors of your blog (here’s a rundown on user roles if you need a refresher).
To cultivate a community or collaborative blog, you may choose to make the entire site private and password-protected. To set a blog to be private, head to Settings → Reading in your dashboard, scroll down to “Site visibility,” and select “Private.” Visitors will get a pop-up notice prompting them to request access, and you’ll have a safe community where you all know one another and can share stories out of the public blogging eye.
For really active communities, try a theme like P2, which allows a blog’s users to post and comment from the home page, and has real-time commenting. It’s how we collaborate internally at WordPress.com and is great for conversation-oriented communication.
By starting a blog to write about your experiences, you’ve already taken a big step toward becoming part of a community that can be a worldwide support network. We’re happy WordPress.com offers additional tools to help you carve out and control a supportive, safe space.
Filed under: Better Blogging, Community
I use the Private marking when I am working on something on-line, but am not ready for show-and-tell. I also set the publish date for 2114, and change it back when I am ready. That way, I think I am the only one who can see it until I am ready. Thanks, Silent
Done.
I am fascinated to see how this will turn out, and would like to hear from others what sort of contacts they make.
I am not sure if this would be interesting to others as well, but I think the option to make a private post accessible to people by invitation (without granting them admin or editor rights) would be great.
I wrote a review about a small companies product the other year and wanted them to be able to pre-view it (including how the pictures would look on the blog) and set the post to private. Send them the link to it, but they could not access it.
Thank you for this option! I write about my own experiences of mental illness, as well as disability and mental health in general. I’m still on the fence about whether or not I should allow users to contact me directly. I might try this feature out for a while and see how it goes.
Very informative. I never gave it a thought about how forms can be of great help to people who want to contact the blogger privately.
These are some good tips. Thanks for sharing
Thanks for this! Hopefully it wlll help some more people out! Also I just like to let everyone know here. for someone who does suffer from depression, I’m writing about it in a book!
Reblogged this on CabbageTalk and commented:
I have suffered with mental health issues the majority of my life. From mild mood swings, to full blown clinical depression to anxiety and stress. I wouldn’t say I’m a certified nut-job, but I come very close! Since stumbling across WordPress, and creating CabbageTalk I have been able to get things off of my chest which has relieved enough stress or tension for me to be able to take a step back and see things from my partner, my wonderful strong man’s point of view. This has now meant that I am able to identify and correct a few of my own problems that cause larger issues within my family. Without my blog, my release, I would bottle it up. Even though I am not necessarily talking about feelings or my mental health [in my blog]. Just the sense of being able to let thoughts leave my brain without losing them is a huge help.
Thank you for the comments form – all your information is perfectly clear to me, but when I open the blog again to view the form, shouldn’t the boxes be empty? They all have my name, email address, etc written automatically in the boxes.
Yup, if you’re logged in to WordPress.com, forms will pre-fill will your information. Readers who are logging in will see their own info, and those who aren’t logged in will see empty boxes.