akerbeltzalba

I had the same problem when my hosting company upgraded me to a newer version of php. A tech-savy friend was able to fudge something for me based on this but it would be good to fix the plugin!

Ok, cheers mate! Just one of those mysteries ??

Ah sorry, the locale is Scottish Gaelic (gd)

Just to confirm, the empty spam messages have completely dried up.

Had a colleague today who put CF7 on his site (Executive2020) and within hours he had picked up a dozen of these too. Fortunately the fix worked for him as well – makes me think even more that the * should be there by default!

@pidengmor I’m cautiously optimistic, I put that * in 2 1/2 days ago and don’t seem to have had one of “those” spam messages since. I’ll watch it for a bit longer but it seems to be working, so thank you very much!

@takayukister may I humbly suggest you make that field compulsory by adding the *? It seems a simple change and if someone wants to allow submission of empty messages (???) they can always remove it. But it seems much more logical for a default setting to require a submission form to have … a message to submit ??

<sigh> no I haven’t, I didn’t realize I had to hack this plugin for it to do something, well, fairly basic. Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve put that in, fingers crossed.

@pidengmor
If by that you mean the instruction

1. Choose “Honeypot” from the CF7 tag generator. Recommended: change the honeypot element’s ID.

then I did that. And clearly the email keeps coming.

I’m hesitant to start blocking IP ranges as that’s an area I’m not very familiar with other than that I’ve had problems with my own (legit) IP getting wrongly blacklisted now and then.

@takayukister
What I don’t get is why CF7 allows the sending of an empty form *at all*, I cannot imagine a scenario where that is a desirable user action. At best, a user has accidentally deleted their message or typed it in the wrong field. At worst, it allows spam like this to come through, making user go through code contortions to try and work around this. CF7 should just not allow an empty-message submission, end of…

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

Hi barnez

Thanks for the suggestion, I installed honeypot but that there is still spam arriving at my email host – would honeypot messages be caught at the WordPress/Akismet level or does honeypot aim to make it easier for email providers to pick up spam?

And whoever marked this as resolved has an itchy trigger finder cause it is NOT resolved…

Ah that was the problem … Google’s reCAPTCHA only works with Contact Form 7 if you have a Pro account. You have to use BestWebSoft’s form in order to use reCAPTCHA without Pro.

Blacklist won’t work… as I said, the submissions are all empty, so I can’t blacklist specific words…

I have Akismet, which doesn’t fix this particular issue.

Can’t remember now what but there was a problem with reCAPTCHA.

Not tried Comment Blacklist, will have a look.

But why would you write the plugin in a way that it allows empty submissions?

I thought I was, when I double-checked after posting it had been turned off but even though it’s been running since shortly after I posted the above, several of these spam messages have come through. It’s not some system bug, I’m sure because there are a) too many inquiries to be believable and b) they all start with a number like From: 58f5c7f785656

Oh heck that was not obvious ??

Thanks for your help, problem sorted!

The default language in Polylang (Plugins > Polylang > Settings tab > Default language) is set to Gàidhlig (which is Scottish Gaelic). It only offers Gàidhlig and English (which would be the WP default) but this does not seem to impact the admin UI language as you suggested it should.