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Hi all
i am a newbie in WordPress. I want to provide a PDF with a captcha and valid email ID. No ecommerce selling, its just to ensure that bots do not bring down the site with multiple leeching activities. Can anyone suggest a simple free plugin ?
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Don’t know about a plugin (but I don’t doubt there’s one out there), but this can be easily done with an email marketing system like Mailchimp.
Form on page connected to email system, user signs up and system sends welcome email with PDF.
You basically want to look for any form plugn that can send an auto-responder to the user who filled out the form. I know Gravity Forms can do this.
Then you’d just set up the auto-responder to send an email to the address entered in the form, and that auto-responder content would be a link to the PDF.
Now – if you wanted to prevent that person from sharing that link with other people, that becomes more difficult.
I use gravity forms for this. It’s excellent. It’s not free, but 10/10 recommend.
Formidable pro does this. Not with free version I don’t think.
Gravity forms and use something like cleantalk.org or oopspam.com
This way their APIs will make sure it’s a real user and not spam.
I use oopspam.com every website ei host and love it. No need for reCAPTCHAs. Clean talk is a more affordable alternative that works well.
Also use [Gravity forms zero spam ](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gravity-forms-zero-spam/)
Use OOPSpam and Turnstile together. One for abuse detection, the other for bot protection.
My advice would be to use contact form 7 as it doesn’t store the messages by default. There is a recaptcha plugin as an addon which sorts that bit. Then I would just have it redirect to the download page. You could no-index the download page and even add in a snippet to prevent it from being accessed if it wasn’t via a form. That would prevent link sharing etc.
With the form builder in Elementor Pro you can send an automated email to the person who submits the form, so it would only work properly if people provide a valid email. In that email you can include a link to the PDF.
You can disable “collect submissions” so it doesn’t store submissions on your site.
Forms are not what Elementor is known for, but it will accomplish what you want and probably at a cheaper price than some of the more comprehensive form plugins.
For spam prevention, you can use a Honeypot field, but your best bet is to setup Google reCAPTCHA v3 which integrates easily with the Elementor form.