sudden spam

  • Resolved flamenco

    (@flamenco)


    5 years, 4 months ago

    Hi!
    I’ve always liked your contact form over the years.

    Various form plugins have been changing rapidly lately. HappyForms is pulling features out of their free version. Contact Form 7 is using the highly annoying recaptcha v3. And so on.

    I generally like to go to you folks when I need a fancier form. I just installed the latest version (4.02) and made my contact form. Boom, within one day I got over 10 spam emails. Then I tried activating reCaptcha. Spam continued to flow in.

    Despite the shortcomings of the other form plugins I was using, they never allowed spam through.

    I was going to open a support ticket on your site, but I didn’t feel like going through disabling all plugins and using a default WP theme, as I’d have to leave my site a mess while waiting to see if this stopped spam. I didn’t find that to be an acceptable situation for my live site. So in a sense this is more of an advisory report than a support request, and I hope it’s helpful in some way. I’ve disabled your plugin for the time being.

    Thanks, Dave

    • This topic was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by flamenco.
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Support Njones35

    (@njones35)

    Hi Dave,

    Sorry to hear you’re having issues with spam. I will do my best to help you get this resolved.

    Do you have reCaptcha on your forms at all? I would highly recommend the V2 Invisible reCaptcha option as this does not impact the user experience, but still offers outstanding protection against spam.

    You can read more about this and how to set it up here: https://formidableforms.com/wordpress-anti-spam-invisible-recaptcha/

    Hope that helps!

    Thread Starter flamenco

    (@flamenco)

    Thanks for responding. I guess you didn’t notice that I already mentioned trying reCaptcha. Spam continued. I even tried the 3rd party plugin that you recommended, and no luck.

    Plugin Author Steve Wells

    (@srwells)

    I know you mentioned you didn’t want to create a new support ticket, but doing so would allow us to get the information we need to get to better assist you.

    If you don’t want to troubleshoot this further that is fine too.

    Sorry again for the inconvenience.

    Thread Starter flamenco

    (@flamenco)

    I have a new theory about my issue. After testing on several of my sites, I think Formidable is probably blameless for the spams I got after setting it up.

    I had been using reCaptcha with another plugin before trying your form, and doing well. I tried changing to yours because I like it, and I wanted to try no reCaptcha.

    I got a bunch of spams, and now I think it’s because I was being targeted by one of those manual spam operations. This would explain how it could manage to get through a form even if it had some antispam features. That seems to be the only answer that makes sense to me.

    My sites have been around for awhile, so who knows what “lists” they’re on.

    Keep up the good work! Dave

    Plugin Support Njones35

    (@njones35)

    Thanks for the update, its much appreciated!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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