testing contact forms – what consitutes spam?

Hi jhnpldng,

I’m sorry to hear you’re having issues with the plugin. I saw your other post on the WordFence forum and responded to that as well.

From what I read in your other forum post, it sounds like there are some hidden technical problems involved here that we need to help you fix or work around.

As of right now, for the Contact Form 7 messages there is no minimum length requirement (from WP-SpamShield). If WP-SpamShield blocks your submission, it will give you an error message that explains why. If you don’t get an error message, then it wasn’t the plugin that blocked it.

The plugin has over 100 different tests for spam, so trying to explain “what constitutes spam” here unfortunately just won’t be possible. It would pretty much require writing a book.

Let’s look into debugging the issue, and helping you find the solution.

Please take a few minutes to work through the Troubleshooting Guide and FAQs, as these solve 90% of issues users have.

If those don’t solve the issue for you, we’ll need a bit more info from you on the specifics, and we’ll need to email back and forth, so please head over to the WP-SpamShield Support Form (our main support channel), and take a moment to fill out a support request. That will allow us to take care of this as quickly as possible for you.

– Scott

Ok, Thanks. Not sure to what level we’ll be able to debug. It’s for a client, someone else built and is hosting the site so there’s no cpanel/server access. As of now, it’s working with cf7 protection disabled, the customer’s happy, I got paid so I’m happy but I would still like to know for sure what the issue is. I imagine it’s something to do with the hosting/server setup. With the exception of plugin conflicts, I’ve never had to deal with email issues. Probably because I usually am dealing with my own hosting.
I have seen the “message to short” error from the spamshield contact form. Would I get that error message from wp-spamshield when using cf7?

There are some tests we can do fairly quickly. If you have WordPress login access and FTP, that’s all we need. (Even if you don’t have FTP actually.) We’re very good at debugging, so it shouldn’t take long to figure out the issue.

I hear you…email issues can be quite a pain. If you didn’t get a chance yet, check out FAQ #4….the one I posted for you in the other forum…it explains a lot of the common issues and fixes.

Yes, the built-in WP-SpamShield Contact Form does have a check for messages being too short, but our spam protection for CF7 does not have that check yet….so no, you would not get that same error message when using CF7. The spam protection for the built in form is going to be the most robust as of right now because the filters have to be ported and adapted for the other 3rd party plugins. Eventually we’ll have more of the filters adapted to the other forms as well. Because of the multi-layered approach we use though, even with just a few of the filters ported to third party plugins, it provides excellent protection.