How To Remove Spam In Wordpress Contact Forms
It’s a great little plugin that is simple to setup, adapt to most any purpose and start getting emails from your website. The Problem: Email Spam from Contact Form 7Once your website has been found and targeted by spammers, you will often find yourself getting anything from. a few a day. to many an hour (like a client of mine recently)And not only are these emails often frequent, but they are hard to stop unless you know what techniques you have at your disposal. The Solutions To Crush Contact Form SpamNot all solutions will work for everyone, so I am going to give you a variety of options here.Try out any you think you like the sound of, and if it does not work, move on to the next. THE HONEYPOTThis is a killer solution I applied to a client's website recently when they were being bombarded with contact form spam!Before I added it he was getting 10-15 per hour. OTHER OPTIONSIf none of the above area solving your spam problem, then there are a couple of other anti-spam options you might want to check out:.
acts as a general gatekeeper or spam checker on your website and can act in conjunction with many other plugins. Just add it and turn it on. can be set up to work with Contact Form 7 via a hook. It might take a programmer to set that up for you.So there you have it, the 5 spam crushing solutions that will help you eradicate Contact Form 7 Spam from your WordPress site today! Which Do I Recommend?I recommend giving the Honey Pot method a try first because it is the least intrusive (the user does not have to see or do anything new) and seems to have great results according to my clients.
How To Remove Spam In Wordpress Contact Forms Download
Identifying the SPAM SourceWe’ve all gotten SPAM, but the first step in preventing it is knowing the source because these 3 types are all handled differently — whether it’s email SPAM, blog comment SPAM, or web form SPAM (i.e. Contact forms, etc). Web form spam includes any form on your website that you are receiving notifications from (via email). If you are interested in how to prevent other kinds of spam issues, see our of related posts that I linked to below for you:Understanding How Form SPAM WorksFirst of all, there are two types of form spammers and you should know that these spammers get paid very well for what they do or they wouldn’t be doing it, so the best you can do is prevent them from abusing your forms in any way possible. “spambots” — programs that find any and all web forms to abuse indiscriminately but their main targets appears to be pages that allow them to post comments touting products and spreading links. Contact forms are caught in the cross fire.
manual spammers — people hired by companies to manually find web forms to abuse, sometimes more targeted to specific websites, but these are difficult to prevent because they typically can make it through all honeypots and captchas mentioned below.How they work is by setting up a group email to place in the Email field of your form as well as advertisement text/links via the comment/message field. Since most default forms have an auto-responder setup it allows them to send their message to the group email address thereby abusing your servers to send out their spam emails. Some bots will even try inject scripts into your site by submitting HTML and Javascript.
Get a Good Contact Form!We recommend and use for our WordPress sites which has all of the options mentioned below! If you use Contact Form 7, there are two plugins that add on the and functionality. Hide your Forms from Search EnginesHide your forms from search engines via (Google Index Remove URLs), a robots.txt file, or sitemap/SEO WordPress plugin. To Prevent Spambots: Disable Auto-respondersBecause most default settings of forms offer an auto-responder that sends an email to the person who filled it out saying “We will get back to you” or restating what they sent in the comments field, this ends up being the perfect “crime” for those spammers who want to spread their message through your form. Don’t fall prey to this easy doorway in, just disable it and instead place a thank you message on the page itself when the form is submitted. Then manually reply to each and every contact message personally.
Disallow LinksBecause most form spam is aimed at spreading links, an easy way to get rid of it is to disallow all links in messages. Check your form/plugin settings for this option. Enable HoneypotsTo prevent robot spammers: Some forms allow placement of a honeypot (hidden field) that is designed to be blank but automated submission robots don’t know this and will often try to fill it out anyways.
When they submit the form with this “bot trap” field filled in, it will prevent submission. Add Anti-Spam Fields or CaptchasTo prevent robot spammers: Because spam bots are written to work with a large number of sites across the internet, they are relatively easy to fool by simply adding an extra question, simple math equation, or a to the contact form that the user has to answer in order to prove they are human. Here is a great article that gives you options in the way of CAPTCHA:. Prevent Manual Spammers: Use Akismet to Mark your SPAM EntriesTo prevent manual spammers: Use to mark incoming entries as spam as soon as they are submitted.
Akismet will work with any contact form plugin and is free for personal sites but $5/mo for commercial ones. For Other Types of FormsFor specific forms like user registration forms, sign-up forms, social networking sites, etc. You may have to do some research on what works best for that specific type of form. If you need help with that, hire to help you do the research.