Spam issues with WPForms Lite

  • Resolved ahrm2

    (@ahrm2)


    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hello all, I am experiencing lots of spam trouble ever since I set up the contact form on one of my websites. I work for a small company and am trying to keep the costs for their website to the minimum.

    I have tried the following:
    – v2 Checkbox reCAPTCHA
    – v2 Invisible reCAPTCHA
    – v3 reCAPTCHA
    – hCAPTCHA

    -> all of which were set to max available security level, but it didn’t stop the spam. I made sure that they’re integrated properly and fuctioning as wanted, because I tested each function after turning it on.

    I tried my luck in registering the bot’s name as a profanity by following the WPForms tutorial “How to Block Form Submissions Containing Profanity” and creating an extra plugin with the php code to block it. (we always get 1 word filled out in all contact form fields, hundreds of times) The profanity filter worked for me because when I tried putting the bot name that I usually receive in emails, the form blocked me immediately. I thought I’ve succeeded but on the next day I got spammed again. So the bot has somehow discovered a way to block my profanity filter AND all of the Captcha Settings…

    I’d be very grateful for any help and tips!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Prashant Rai

    (@prashantrai)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hey @ahrm2,

    Thanks for contacting us and we’re sorry to hear that you’ve encountered spam issues.

    If you’re still having spam with reCAPTCHA enabled ans since you’ve tried option avalible options, you can consider the third-party plugins such as WordPress Zero Spam or Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk which work out of the box to protect your forms against spam.

    Hope this helps!

    Thread Starter ahrm2

    (@ahrm2)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hi @prashantrai,

    Thank you for the fast reply – I will try these out in the next few weeks.

    In the meantime the spambot has “infected” another project I’m working on (not WordPress and not WPForms related, but using the same webhost) however I managed to identify the IP of the spammer there and blocked it by changing the htaccess file – I think the problem is resolved for now.

    I hope this helps somebody else struggling with my issue 🙂

    Prashant Rai

    (@prashantrai)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hey @ahrm2 – You’re most welcome. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

    Kindly,

    Nik Sebastian

    (@niksebastian)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    Hi @ahrm2 — We haven’t heard back from you in about a week, so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread for now. But if you’d like us to assist further, please feel welcome to continue the conversation.

    Thanks!

    Thread Starter ahrm2

    (@ahrm2)

    3 years, 11 months ago

    May I ask 1 more thing? 🙂

    I have currently removed all the contact forms from my website or at least the elementor elements from the page. The WP contact forms still exist in my WPForms plugin, because I intend on using them in the future again as this is just a temporary solution. However I still get spam? Do I need to delete the contact forms completely from the plugin too in order to deactivate them? I have deleted my website cache in advance.

    Thank you for your time!

    Prashant Rai

    (@prashantrai)

    3 years, 8 months ago

    Hey @ahrm2 – Thanks for following up on this ticket, and I sincerely apologize for the delay in getting back to your support request.

    If you’ve removed the forms from the front end of the website, then you’re good to go and you don’t need to delete the form from the plugin. Since you’re still getting spam submission (you can take a look at our documentation here to prevent spam), can you please check if the form is deleted from the front end? I looked into the website, and it seems that you’ve removed the form from the front end of the website.

    Further, can you please check if the spam submissions are coming from another plugin?

    Please let me know!

    Thread Starter ahrm2

    (@ahrm2)

    3 years, 8 months ago

    Hey @prashantrai Problem is solved! No more spam! I looked one more time really detailed into the server logs and realized the contact form entries aren’t coming from the website i suspected. They were coming from a very similar domain name that we registered later and cloned to look exactly like the one i linked here. The notification text for incoming conact form entries was apparently not changed back then. Now that CAPTCHA is turned on for both of the websites the spam stopped.

    Prashant Rai

    (@prashantrai)

    3 years, 8 months ago

    Hey @ahrm2 – Thrilled to hear that the issue is fixed now. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

    Kindly,

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

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