: Setting up a coming soon page. Should I create a whole database for "Sign up now for updates" email addresses? I'm helping a friend set up a "Coming Soon" page for his website. Naturally,

@Welton855

Honestly, unless there is an incentive (10% off for registered customers, learn how we solved world-hunger, etc) for people to sign up with something yet unknown, it seems like a waste of time.

Now if the site is going to have a mailing list anyway for a good reason when it will be up and running, might as well write that part of the software first and make the Coming Soon page its UI. In that case you are not doing much extra work.

The solution you propose is called security through obscurity and is never a good idea. At the very least you can have the sign up form add a line to a private text file on the websever. This is trivial to do in PHP and I assume the same of other systems. No databases need to be involved here!

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@Heady270

I would set up a contact form that will send an email each time somebody is interested. Unless you think you will get 10s of these a day, that shouldn't be a horrible solution. My guess is you'll be lucky to get 1 a day.

I wrote a contact form that you can use for such a purpose: ostermiller.org/contactform/ I would configure such that preview and captcha are disabled. I would create a form that asks for the email address and has a pre-canned subject and email body in hidden fields. When the interested person submits from the website, your friend gets an email from them saying "I'm interested in hearing when your website is up".

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