If you have a contact form on your website, chances are you are getting a lot of spam from ‘Sexy Russion Girls’ and ‘marketers offering all sorts’. There are a couple ways to stop this:
- Capcha Code – a lot of forms ask you to fill in an image generated number or word. I don’t like this method as it’s a bit of extra work for the customer and sometimes it’s hard to read.
- Honeypot plugin – this is the one I like best and the one I prefer to use. It seems to work very well.
Honeypot is a spam prevention technology. It tricks and traps spam bots into revealing themselves by giving them a field to fill out that human users can not see. When bots fill the in the field, they end up revealing themselves and are caught before they could post spam.
To install a honeypot secret field to fool those spambots, follow the instructions on this video. Don’t you think the guy sounds like Pooh bear who loves honey. Or follow the written instructions below. Or ask me to do it for you.
- Install using the WordPress “Add Plugin” feature — just search for “Contact Form 7 Honeypot”.
- Confirm that Contact Form 7 is installed and activated. Then activate this plugin.
- Edit a form in Contact Form 7.
- Choose “Honeypot” from the CF7 tag generator. Recommended: change the honeypot element’s ID.
- Insert the generated tag anywhere in your form. The added field uses inline CSS styles to hide the field from your visitors.
Spam on your Comment boxes – use Akismet plugin
You may still receive spam via your ‘Comment’ boxes on your blog or pages that you have the comment boxes open. If you want to stop the spam on these, it’s best to use Akismet plugin. Activate the plugin and then generate an API key by following their instructions. They will try get you to fill out your credit card but if you want to start with the free version just drag the slider that’s titled “What’s Akismet worth to you” to Zero and they won’t ask for payment – submit and voila, it’s all set up.
What are spambots you might ask?
Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, blogs, forums, and other types of web forms that it can then use to submit bogus content. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Other spam messages are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking.