Akismet and CleanTalk – still getting spam

Hi @tnightingale

I hope you’re well today!

I’m sorry to hear about the issue.

Can you please check if following two options are enabled on the form?:

1. in e-mail field settings look for the “Validate” option – it should be enabled; when it is enabled it will not allow any space in e-mail field or incorrectly formatted e-mail address – so even if CleanTalk can be bypassed by that, Forminator would not allow such e-mails anyway

2. in form’s “Behavior” settings, additionally enable “Honeypot” option – it’s a very simple protection but together with CleanTalk and/or Akismet may decrease number of spam submissions.

And if it comes to that, let me confirm: by spam you do actually mean various “spammy” submissions and you can see those submissions on “Form -> Submission” page (that is, if your form is set to store submission in DB), right? Or is it only about e-mails received (and if so – are they for sure Forminator notifications)?

Also – the form itself, is it set to “Load via Ajax” and does it have submission method set to “Ajax” (instead of “page reload”)? Both these options can be set in form’s “Behavior” settings too.

Kind regards,
Adam

Hello,

Serge from CleanTalk plugin support is here. We investigated this case and found that the Forminator plugin under certain conditions can skip invalid addresses. It would be great if Forminator developers fixed this, we are happy to provide all the information from our side, but we need 1-2 days to prepare more detailed information.

Hi @sergecleantalk

Thank you for jumping in.

If you did found a way to bypass Forminator’s validation of e-mail address we’d surely be interested in fixing it.

It would be great if you could provide additional information on your findings so our developers would look into it and work on our code accordingly.

However, since this is a support forum only and only for free versions of our plugins – and our developers are also not monitoring this space directly – would you mind dropping us a line directly to “[email protected]”?

Please feel free to refer to this topic to speed up things but I’d appreciate direct contact regarding this matter as it would simply help us act faster and we could also get our developers in direct contact.

Best regards,
Adam

@wpmudev-support8 Hi Adam,

Thank you for your reply. We will send details to “[email protected]” as soon as possible.

Hello @tnightingale,

We’ve fixed this issue. Please install the fixed version from here: https://github.com/CleanTalk/wordpress-antispam/releases/download/fix-version/cleantalk-spam-protect.zip

All the changes made will be included in the next stable release.

Thank you both. I’ve installed the updated CT plugin version and will see how that goes and report back here in a couple of days.

@wpmudev-support8 – yes to your questions about our set up, have validation, honeypot, ajax loading. I do all those things for all the forms I set up. And the spam was all contact form submissions stored in the db and emailed.

Hello @wpmudev-support8,

We’ve sent more details regarding this issue to [email protected].

Hi @sergecleantalk and @dimitrycleantalk,

Thank you. We have received the details of the issue by email and forwarded to our Forminator team for further checks.

We will get in touch with you directly if we need further details or more information.

@tnightingale thanks for the update, please let us know if you need further help or clarification.

Kind regards,
Zafer

Hi @tnightingale

It’s been a while since last post here and the issue is being investigated/handled on our end thanks to contribution from CleanTalk so I’m marking this topic as resolved.

Our developers are working on it so please keep an eye on the plugin’s changelog here for further references

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/forminator/#developers

Kind regards,
Adam