I'm hoping to get some feedback on this. It seems to be working quite well.
I've been adding a field to my forms that ask a very simple question. Such as "What is x + x?" Or "How many days are in a leap year?" And then in the field description I'll say "Write the correct answer in the field below" and label the field something like "Anti-Spam Challenge".
And then I'll integrate conditional logic on the form submission. The conditional logic only sends the notification if the field had the correct answer. On the front end, it will appear to submit no matter what they wrote in the field.
I've accepted there's no way to prevent actual human beings from submitting BS form entries, but so far, not a single bot message has been sent.
Thoughts about this approach?
Yeah it seems fine. Why didn’t you add CAPTCHA? Just curious. It holds back bot spam.
You do have the reCaptcha add on too
The honeypot feature adds a dynamic hidden field that would only be filled in if a bot were doing it. It changes everytime you reload the page. Your method is a bit rudimentary, and you’d have to manually change it all the time.
I just use the honeypot approach which gets rid of 99% of spam and doesn’t inconvenience customers at all.
Both Gravity Forms and Formidable Forms offer the Captcha that Cloudflare provides. It is very very powerful and catches most jokers playing games on your site. Before enabling recaptch on a website I worked on, this poor women was getting thousands of spam forms being submitted to the point her shared Webserver kept crashing on her.
Yes, this is a classic anti-spam technique.
Personally I don’t use anything that impedes the user flow so usually go with CloudFlare Turnstile or other transparent method, especially if the form is lead generating.
As other have mentioned, I’ve also had great success with Cloudflare Turnstile lately.
Another option is using conditional logic on the submit button itself; for example, I’ve set it up so the submit button is hidden if the message field contains “http.” Prevents the form from being submitted at all.
Good luck!
Gravity forms with honeypot, gravity forms zero spam, and recaptcha or turnstile if you must.
Do this:
* Gravity Forms
* [Gravity Forms Zero Spam](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gravity-forms-zero-spam/) (free)
* [Really Simple Captcha](https://wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-captcha/) plugin (free), which allows you to add a dynamic (aka self generating) math or Alphanumeric captcha field to any Gravity form.
I do this on some sites I manage for family/friends. It deters 99.99% of spam.
If it works it works!