Contact forms that send nothing — study and test harness

We submitted the contact form on public Lovable and Bolt sites while recording every network request and blocking all of them, so no message ever reached a site owner. On the final run, 27 of 105 forms showed a success message ("Message sent!") and sent nothing; 54 of 105 sent the typed message. On sites without demo signs, 16 of 73 were fake.

Write-up: https://formgong.com/en/blog/contact-forms-that-send-nothing/

File	What it is
PREREG.md	Rules written before testing, and every later change with the reason (seven harness faults found by manual checks)
RESULTS.md	Final numbers with denominators
harness.mjs	The test: Playwright + installed Chrome, one visit per site
fixtures/	23 local pages with known answers (expected.tsv)

Run it

npm install
npm run fixtures                       # 23 known-answer pages; all must match
node harness.mjs https://your-site.example --out result.jsonl

Requires Google Chrome (the harness launches it with channel: "chrome").

How it decides

After the contact form is found, every request is intercepted. Same-origin static files and cross-origin scripts, styles and fonts load; everything else is recorded and aborted. The harness fills visible fields with obvious test values (never honeypots), presses send and watches the page for five seconds.

• SENDS — a request carried what was typed.
• FAKE_SUCCESS — no such request, no other outgoing request, and a success message (or alert()) appeared.
• NO_EFFECT, MAILTO, RELOAD, REDIRECT_NO_SEND, OTHER_REQUEST, INVALID, VOID — see PREREG.md.

If your form sends nothing

Open DevTools → Network and press send: a working form adds a request that carries the text you typed. The write-up's fix section lists three ways to fix it. Coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) can install a skill that adds a working form and replaces fake handlers:

npx skills add formgong/skills

Ethics

Nothing is submitted to anyone. The site list and per-site results are not published, and the write-up names no site. Please use the harness the same way.

MIT licensed. Made by Formgong.