Let’s Prevent Spam in our Contact Forms!

With Google’s recent changes to reCAPTCHA—now requiring a Google Cloud Project—it’s the perfect time to explore alternative ways to keep spam out of your WordPress contact forms. Join us for this meetup where we’ll dive into different spam prevention techniques and tools.

Introduction

In the first hour, we’ll discuss:
– reCAPTCHA alternatives like Cloudflare Turnstile and hCaptcha
– Basic spam prevention strategies including honeypots, manual conditional fields, and noindexing pages with forms
– WordPress plugins that help reduce spam

The final 30 minutes will be a Q&A session where you can ask questions, share what has worked (or not worked) for you, and learn from others in the community.

Whether you’re a WordPress beginner or an experienced user, this session will provide practical solutions to keep your contact forms spam-free.

View on meetup.com

Notes

Anti-Spam Concepts

• Captchas
• Disallow or restrict specific words, links, IP addresses, etc.
• Honeypots
• Make it more difficult for bots
  • Conditional logic
  • Longer time to submit
  • Hide (noindex) the page that the form resides on
  • Multi-page forms
  • Quizzes
• Properly validate fields

Contact Form Plugins

• Contact Form 7
  • And plugins like Spam Protect
  • AntiSpam for Contact Form 7
• Fluent Forms
• Formidable Forms
• Forminator Forms
• Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms
• WPForms
• WSForms
• Page Builders
  • Beaver Builder Forms
  • Elementor Forms
  • Kadence Forms
  • Divi Forms

Anti-Spam Plugins

• Does it integrate with your form plugin?
• Make sure to check the settings – installing/activating the plugin is often not enough!
• Akismet
  • And possible form-specific plugins like Gravity Forms Akismet add on
• Antispam Bee
• CleanTalk
• Gravity Forms Zero Spam
• Titan Anti-Spam
• WP Armour
• Zero Spam

Captcha Plugins

• hCaptcha (options screenshot)
• Simple Cloudflare Turnstile
  • And possible form-specific plugins like Kadence Captcha or Cloudflare Turnstile for GiveWP

Other Options

• Code for Gravity Forms (note about text field)
• Don’t use a contact form / add and obfuscate email addresses on the page
• Noindex form pages so they are not easily found by search engines
• Quizzes
• Gravity forms Moderation add on plus Perspective
• Google or other outside forms

Additional Resources

A few links from meeting participants:

• Comment form spam
  • Universal comment blacklist
  • Add the phrases from the link above under Settings, Discussions, Disallowed Comment Keys
• Email Address Encoder
• WP Code
• Creating custom rules in Cloudflare
• WordPress Helpdesk Support, join their free community, attend one of their virtual meetups

Recording