Spam got through on second day

  • Resolved oneirishrover

    (@oneirishrover)


    4 years, 8 months ago

    I love the look and feel of your plugin. I added it to my website contact page two days ago.

    Tonight, sadly, I see a spam email via the contact page. I wonder what I am doing wrong. I successfully replicated what the spambot did – namely fill in just the NAME and EMAIL parts of the contact form and hit SEND.

    Perhaps my [cf7ic] is in the wrong place. Here is my code:

    <label> Your Name (required)
    [text* your-name] </label>

    <label> Your Email (required)
    [email* your-email] </label>

    <label> Subject
    [text your-subject] </label>

    <label> Your Message
    [textarea your-message] </label>

    [cf7ic]

    [submit “Send”]

    Thanks for any help.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Hello,
    I am sorry to hear you are having problems with the CAPTCHA.

    So what you are saying is that the CAPTCHA is not working at all?
    You can just fill in the name and email and click send and it bypasses the CAPTCHA?

    Do you have any other contact form 7 plugins installed like conditional fields?
    Sometimes other plugins can cause compatibility issues.

    Thread Starter oneirishrover

    (@oneirishrover)

    Hi Kyle. Thanks for the reply.

    The captcha appears and appears to work. But the spammer (and me replicating the spammer) only needed to fill in name and email address (ignoring the message box and the captcha)….and hit send.

    I don’t have any other contact form 7 plugins installed.

    I am going today to look and see if there are other plugin conflicts going on.

    Best wishes.

    So your CAPTCHA is in the correct spot, it only needs to be in the form editor with the rest of the form fields.

    It appears that you are using the default Contact Form 7 form layout and you only added the [cf7ic] shortcode.

    I created a test form but was unable to replicate the issue, could you create a test page for me on your site so I can test it?

    It would also help if you went to Tools->Site Health->Info and clicked the Copy site info to clipboard and pasted the contents here so I can see your system info so I can replicate your WordPress environment for testing.

    I’ve a similar issue on one of my website, spam mails keep coming, how do bots/spammer bypass captcha

    A bot could theoretically bypass the CAPTCHA by random chance. Bots generally auto fill all the fields in a form, however the Image CAPTCHA plugin includes some honey pot fields to catch such attacks.

    Could you provide a link to your website so I can check your site and run some tests?

    website check business goals form

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by devt204.

    I just tested your site and the CAPTCHA is working correctly, however I believe I know why spam is getting through.

    Are you using any caching or speed optimization plugins?
    It looks like the CAPTCHA is not updating, it appears to be cached.
    Normally this would not be much of an issue, except in your case, the answer is the first option, so bots are probably selecting the first option and bypassing the honeypots.

    If you do not have any caching or speed optimization plugins in place, then I will have to look deeper as to why the random function is not working. If this is the case, please go to Tools -> Site Health -> Info and click the “Copy site into to clipboard” then paste that info here, that may help me figure out what is causing the issue.

    If you do have a caching plugin then a temporary fix would be to clear your cache so that the correct option is either the second or third choice.
    The free version of the plugin only has basic functionality whereas the Pro version was built with ajax so that the CAPTCHA would always be random even with a caching plugin. It also randomizes the choices after submission as well.
    I might also look into updating the free version of the plugin so that the correct answer is never the first option, however I will have to research this to see if bots usually select the first option or if they select at random. It will also take me some time to get around to making the update as I unfortunately do not have the time to update it at the moment.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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