Tips for Avoiding Spam Form Submissions

We think it鈥檚 pretty safe to say that no one likes spam. It鈥檚 annoying, it clogs up your inbox, and it can make finding the things you actually need more difficult.

Recently, we鈥檝e received a handful of messages from clients using the Gravity Forms plugin (part of the聽聽bundle) about spam form submissions. Unfortunately, if forms are published on your site, spammers and bots can find them and fill them out.

As a result, we’ve added an alert that will notify you and your staff if you have any unread form submissions. We hope this will help you not only better track your form notifications, but also take action on any forms receiving spam submissions.

If you do notice a large amount of spam, here are a few solutions you can try.

  1. Delete Unused Forms:聽Even if you no longer monitor them, any forms that are published will still be open for spam submissions. The easiest way to eliminate these spam submissions is to simply delete those unused forms.

  2. Activate a Honeypot:聽This is probably our top recommendation (and not just because it has a cool name). Essentially, a honeypot acts as a sort of 鈥渢rap鈥 in your form and creates a field that only spammers or bots see and complete. You can activate a honeypot on any form with the click of a button, and it鈥檚 up to you what you want the form to do if the honeypot flags a submission 鈥 skip the entry entirely, or mark it as spam.

  3. Add a reCAPTCHA Field:聽You鈥檝e probably seen this one before 鈥 the 鈥渃lick here if you鈥檙e not a robot鈥 box. Before you can add any reCAPTCHA fields to your forms, there are a few extra steps you鈥檒l need to take to set it up. You can learn more about these steps聽.

For more detailed directions on how to utilize any of these spam mitigation options, you can check out this聽听辞谤听聽for support.

Here鈥檚 hoping your form submissions are a little less crowded (and spammy) moving forward!