Akismet spam false positives for contact forms

  • Resolved gjefle

    (@gjefle)


    5 years, 2 months ago

    We use a couple different contact form plugins (Formidable and Visual Form Builder Pro) in conjunction with Akismet. But we have the constant problem with real people trying to use the contact forms but getting flagged and then blocked as spam.

    As soon as we disable Akismet, the form lets these people submit their contact so we it’s pretty obvious Akismet is the culprit, not the contact form plugin. It even blocks me as the website admin if I’m not logged in!

    There is no way to tell Akismet when its made a mistake, so how do we solve this without scrapping Akismet or finding another alternative plugin?

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Support csonnek

    (@csonnek)

    Happiness Rocketeer ??

    @gjefle – Spammers are always working to find new ways to get around our spam filtering. Akismet is always learning so we rely on site owners that come across a piece of spam that Akismet misses (missed spam) to mark it as spam so it helps Akismet learn and not miss similar spam in the future. The same thing applies to things we’re catching as spam by mistake (false positives) – reports from site owners to teach Akismet “hey this isn’t spam” is crucial to have accurate spam catching.

    Unfortunately, Formidable Forms did not add the moderation options needed in order to mark false positives and missed spam, so there’s no way to inform Akismet in their plugin.

    VFBP does give you the ability to mark missed spam, but not a way to deal with submissions that are flagged as a false positive. So while it does help somewhat, it doesn’t have the feature you need: to let us know a submission is a false positive.

    Since the functionality to submit missed spam and false positives needs to be built into the plugin itself, you would need to look at an alternative like the Contact Form that’s part of Jetpack (free) or Gravity Forms (paid) to get the ability to mark things we missed as spam and to fix things we caught by mistake.

    I hope that clarifies things. Let me know if you have any questions or need help with anything else.

    Marking as solved as the plugins in question are working as expected, they just lack the functionality you need.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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