Form spam is spam that arrives via your website forms. It can be annoying, a waste of time and sometimes even dangerous. Most of the time, form spam is sent through a contact form’s name and email fields, but spammers can also use your website’s forms to send spam through other fields as well.<\/span><\/p>\n Form spam can be frustrating, because it wastes your time by forcing you to sift through nonsensical messages in order to find legitimate inquiries. These messages can make it difficult to keep track of important leads.<\/span><\/p>\n Most of us have likely encountered form spambots, those annoying little pests that submit fake data to your web forms. Form spam bots generally fall into one of three categories:<\/span><\/p>\n These are the most common and most irritating type of form spambots. They’re usually preprogrammed with a list of keywords and forum URLs that they’ll automatically detect and then submit their spam message to.<\/span><\/p>\n Spammer-bots are the most difficult to stop, mainly because they’re constantly evolving their methodologies and often have thousands of variations. This means that any static filtering mechanism is just not going to cut it.<\/span><\/p>\n Although less common than spammer-bots, these are easier to stop as they don’t use sophisticated botnet technology. These bots will simply crawl your site looking for forms or links, then harvest the URL of the site for later use. They tend to be used in two ways: either directly by spammers posting messages on forums or blogs (forum spam) or by other bots that are part of a larger botnet.<\/span><\/p>\n There’s also no shortage of human spammers who will manually fill out your forms for financial gain.<\/span><\/p>\n Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to stop spammers from trying to send their junk through your forms, but you can control how they fill out their forms. Here are five tips to keep your form spam free.<\/span><\/p>\n The Honeypot method is a system designed to prevent form spam. It uses an invisible form field to catch bots, while still allowing human visitors to submit the form as usual.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s a simple technique and it doesn\u2019t require any additional coding or programming skills. This makes it simple for anyone to use and extremely effective for preventing form spam.<\/span><\/p>\n Click <\/span>here <\/span><\/a>to know about the honeypot method, why it’s one of the best ways to prevent anti-spam and how to implement it.<\/span><\/p>\n ReCAPTCHA is a free service by Google that protects your website from spam and abuse. It is far better than a captcha in the sense that it does not display an image or text. You have to click on the checkbox with enabled javascript.<\/span><\/p>\n If you have a sign-up form on your website then, there are chances that it might get spammed by malicious bots. Recaptcha will prevent spamming of your signup form and help you filter out the real humans from the bots.<\/span><\/p>\n Form validation is the process of ensuring that every single piece of data submitted into your form is legitimate. If not, you can then redirect them back to the form with an error message to submit the correct information.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There are a few things to consider here:<\/span><\/p>\n Does it slow down your form? Data validation adds an extra layer to your form and can make it take longer for users to complete. It’s not an issue for shorter forms but can get more complicated when you have more than 10 fields.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Interested to learn how you can build fast, painless forms that users love? Read here: <\/span>https:\/\/formx.stream\/blog\/design-painless-forms\/<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Block suspicious users with a blacklist plugin<\/b><\/p>\n Blacklisting is the practice of marking an entity as unfavorable, disreputable, or untrustworthy. The entity might be an IP address, a username, an email address, a domain name, or even a keyword pattern.<\/span><\/p>\nWho\u2019s responsible for all the spam? Types of form spammers<\/b><\/h2>\n
Spammer-bots<\/b><\/h3>\n
Generic spammer-bots and URL harvesters<\/b><\/h3>\n
Human spammers<\/b><\/h3>\n
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Five ways to beat form spam\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n
Use the Honeypot method<\/b><\/h3>\n
Enable ReCAPTCHA<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
Validate all submitted data\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n