I had the novel idea the other day about an internet based confession service for the catholic church. e.g "fill out the for below confessing your sins and one of our fathers will reply with the appropriate course of action... What do you think? I thought of it as a kind of a joke... do you think it has merit?

Hmm I have seen websites where people post confessions, but they don't get replies from a 'specialist', just comments from other users.

I don't think it could be a 'serious' sort of thing, as in you can't expect a father to respond to you, because they would probably believe that you are only reflecting to your sins when you connect to God in a church, not to your computer.

For a 'joke' thing, it could work I suppose. Have you seen those 'book of answers' where the book contains page after page of 'replies', and you are supposed to ask a question and randomly open up to one page and find your 'answer'. It could have rather funny results. I suppose you could have a database of answers, and when someone submits a confession, he gets a random, vague, funny response.

That internet is a great place for the Catholic faith to expand to. The main threat though would be spammers and inappropriate messages.

I doubt the Catholic faith would agree to this. It's just lazy really. If you have a sin to confess to, go to the Church and confess. Simple.

I doubt the Catholic Church would agree to this as well, but for other reasons.

Instead of spammers, how about data-miners. They might get a juicy confession about a really huge mistake and post it on their website. What if you committed larceny to your best friend for $100,000? That's not the kind of thing you'd want to spread on the Internet. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Also, the internet is definitely not a great place for the Catholic faith to expand. If it tries, it will be knocked over by all the opposition to trying to assimilate. I mean, you can have Catholic websites, sure, but don't try to influence others. You'll only fail.

When it all comes to security, it will always be a risk that unauthorized people may take part of your confessionals. If you take this under consideration, you wont confess yours worst secret online. I wouldn´t.
For about six years ago I was webmaster for a church, and as a service for the church and community, we had a Prayer Request online. Because the congregation wasn't to big, and the most part of the parish were elders there wasn't many who used it. But for them who used the service, sent anonymous prayer requests for the prayer team, to pray for. When the project got evaluated, many thought it filled up the need in the community.
Apart from the security issue, I see no reason why not having a confessional service online for those who share the same faith, but won't go to a church for some reason.

The most successful confession site is postsecret.com, where you post your secrets by mailing postcards with their confession to the blog author. The extra effort needed to mail in a postcard wards off spammers and fakes. PostSecret is a huge success and is a cultural phenomenon, perhaps you could think up something creative like that

Although I am an atheist and I don't confess much (only did it once in my life and after being somewhat forced by my religion teacher) I find the idea very good. I can't (and I'm sure I'm not the only one) tell the priest everything since I am ashamed (for example: how can anybody go to the priest and tell that he had fantasies with his best friend's mom). Some kind of Internet based confessions would make it much easier to admit your sins since you don't come face to face with the priest. Just like when at the phone you can say things you would never say in the face!
But I guess if you fell no shame you don't learn anything from the sin. So I guess you have to feel ashamed by what you did so you won't do it again...