I have had a spam attack recently (1500+ submissions in a day) which lead me to install captha on Contact Form 7, as I didn’t want my business email to get blocked. After installing captcha I am still getting marketing spam emails but they are not very bothersome.
However, I checked Analytics and noticed that out of 41 form starts only 1 form was actually submitted. And my leads from forms have dropped alarmingly. So, today I stopped captcha and installed Akismet instead.
Every email is of very high value, so I don’t want to miss any leads. However, I want the form to be as painless to submit as possible and don’t want any mails to not reach my inbox, even if it goes in my spam folder. I noticed that Akismet stops spam email by blocking the submit button. I am afraid that it may block some real leads from submitting because of this harsh condition.
So, I want to take recommendations where my forms don’t get bombarded by spam attacks, but also does not include a hinderance to form submission. I am willing to pay for the service, but don’t want any new visible field added to the form.
[ad_2]
With any spam protection system, you will get false positives (legitimate submissions that are blocked). But you can minimize the risk.
Not sure about Akismet, but with OOPSpam you can view and report blocked form submissions on both your WordPress dashboard and their dashboard.
This way you can periodically review blocked submissions and see if any legitimate submissions have been blocked.