Unfortunately the more difficult a CAPTCHA is to break, the more unfriendly it is to the end user. This largely depends on the quality of the CAPTCHA. But it should reduce it to a level whereby you don’t require any additional spam challenges (CAPTCHA, math questions, etc.).
The added field uses inline CSS styles to hide the field from your visitors.Īltering the Honeypot Output HTML
Please review Contact Form 7’s privacy policies for more information. This is an addon plugin, and requires Contact Form 7. This plugin does not track users, store any user data, send user data to external servers, nor does it use cookies. Visit the Honeypot for Contact Form 7 plugin page for additional information or to buy us a coffee to say thanks. Follow us on Twitter and on Facebook for updates and news.
Be sure to check your Honeypot settings to turn storing the honeypot on for this. Using Flamingo allows you to track spam submissions (via inbound messages / spam tab in Flamingo), showing you what got caught in the honeypot and why. We highly recommend Flamingo with CF7 and this plugin. For the best results, we suggest always using the latest versions of WordPress and CF7. It is recommended to use version 5.3+ of CF7, for better spam logging. You will need Contact Form 7 version 3.0+ at a minimum. This works under the idea (backed up by testing) that spam bots submit forms super fast (usually 1-2 seconds), whereas people take longer. This checks how long it takes to submit the form and if under a user-defined threshold, it rejects the submission as spam. This is how a honeypot catches the bot - it introduces an additional field in the form that if filled out will trigger the honeypot and flag the submission as spam.Īdditionally, as of version 2.1, the plugin also features an optional submission time check. In this way they somewhat blindly fill in fields, regardless of whether the field should be filled in or not. While some spam is hand-delivered, the vast majority is submitted by bots scripted in a specific (wide-scope) way to submit spam to the largest number of form types. The principle of a honeypot is simple - bots are stupid. This simple addon module to the wonderful Contact Form 7 (CF7) plugin adds basic honeypot anti-spam functionality to thwart spambots without the need for an ugly captcha.