Improve spam protection

Hey @bianca205,

It’s great to hear that you like the flexibility of WPForms. Thanks for the great feedback on our support team as well!

We’re sorry to hear that you are recieveing a lot of spams. In WPForms, we have a built-in anti-spam option which is enabled by default in the form builder > Settings > General (see screenshot here).

We have another anti-spam protection feature, hCaptcha. This is a good option if you’d prefer not to sign up for Google’s reCAPTCHA service. Within your forms, hCaptcha will display a checkbox asking users to prove they’re human (much like Google’s v2 Checkbox reCAPTCHA). We have a detailed guide for setting up hCaptcha.

If you need help while setting up any of these Captcha options, please feel welcome to post in our WPForms Lite support forum.

Alternatively, 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.

Thank you for the suggestion on the Phone field. In case it helps, I’d like to share more details about the Phone field here. Because of its advanced features, it is included as one of the Fancy Fields which require a paid license.

By default, our phone field use geolocation to detect the visitor’s general region and adjust the suggested phone format as well as the country code, which is submitted together with the phone number.

The geolocation is powered by our own geolocation API we maintain and update, which is why this is a paid feature. Please note that the phone field is available with any of the paid licenses, including the Basic license level.

If you want a more simple approach to collecting phone numbers with WPForms, you can use the Numbers field or the Single Line Text field in combination with our input mask.

Could you let me know if the information above has been helpful for you? And if you could consider updating the review, that’d be great!

But most importantly, we definitely appreciate the feedback, and I’ve made a note for our team to discuss how we can better communicate how and what the Phone field does.

Thanks!`

Thanks for your extensive response. I would like to add some clarification in order to make this review more helpful for you. I am aware of the build in anti-spam option. The thing is, that option is not working so well unfortunately.

And compared to other form plugins, it seems that your plugin is attracting more spam. I’ve seen other people raising this issue to. My advice would be to do some endurance testing on this (maybe your plugin is a target?).

In my experience, the spam occurred in different server environments at different hosting parties although almost alle of them shared plans. I am happy to forward you some examples of the spam messages that are coming through the forms but I assume you have those. If not, let me know.

Switching to a different plugin solved most of the spam.
In all honesty if I have to choose between adding another third party plugin (like zero spam) or switching to another form plugin that does proper spam filtering out of the box (never 100%), I choose the latter.

Thanks, I now better understand your reasoning for not including the phone field in the free plan because of its advanced usage options. For me, I just want my phone nr field to be html5 compliant so it can be auto filled out, Also thanks for pointing out hCaptcha. I would give that a try. I used to be on a paid plan (where I used the phone field) for some the sites I manage. But the spam is an issue on all of them.

I will watch the development of this plugin closely. If you are able to improve the out of the box spam, Ill happily upvote my rating. All the best.

To clarify: this review is for the free version.

Hey @bianca205,

Thanks again for the detailed feedback – we definitely appreciate it! I’ll pass it along to our team so that it’s on our radar to look into.

If we can help with anything else please feel welcome to reach out!

Have a good one ??