Are you tired of spam submission in your WordPress contact forms?
This is the easiest way to do it…just use Fluent Forms plugin (FREE or PAID).
I keep seeing annoying ideas on Facebook groups. Mostly from people using built-in pagebuilder (Elementor) forms functions, or other inferior form plugins. And they try to solve their form spam issues with even more convoluted ideas like:
- install another plugin for spam protection
- hacky recaptcha integrations
- custom urls
- paid services (I don’t know what they do exactly)
- honeypot
- using security plugins
- WAF blocking (lol)
- …and on, and on, and on
Don’t mess with that shit. Use Fluent Forms. Their built-in spam protection is great. No need to pay for expensive services, annoy your users with captcha, or site-slowing 3rd-party integrations.
You’re welcome.
Johnny,Antispam Firewall by Cleantalk $6/ 1year (&3months if one pays before trial period expiration) blocks spam EVERYWHERE- Contact forms, comments,etc.
I use it in conjunction with Askimet but the latter thouh a great one, misses some bots every now and then.
Have you tried it?
I have some clients on it and they love it. I just hate the idea of paying for a simple service. How many sites does that plan cover?
Johnny , I think one is not limited to any number of site but unlimited. Their spam IP addresses dB updates hourly. But whitelist your IP addresses because it’s a bit paranoid. Can’t deny I’ve heard some people say their clients have been blocked. I mean cases with legitimate comments or contact queries. However I use it from an year. No legitimate contact was blocked by it.
Thanks for your advice about Fluent Forms. I know you love them from your emails months ago & I had a look at the plugin. A great one.
But love Forminator ! It’s a free plugin with premium features.
Do have a look at it & if you like it or don’t, review it .
What settings in fluent forms for anti spam? Or is it set up out of the box?
Already set up out of the box. Try the plugin and you’ll see.
+1 for Cleantalk. Used it for 3 years. Works very well for the money. Currently $24 a year (a year!) for 5 sites (plus various extension bonuses). Reduced spam emails through my Sendy WP sign-up from a flood to a trickle. Picks up stuff Akismet misses as well. I guess the appeal is Cleantalk focuses only on spam protection, bit like MXroute focuses only on email etc. Not sure if spam protection is top of Fluent Form’s priorities. The plugin has lots of other features that require development resources, too. A great experiment would be to create identical WP test sites but with different spam-protection systems and see which fends off/lets in the most spam
No joke, Cleantalk works well. I’ve had a couple clients in love with it. I only don’t like the site slowdown. It would’ve been great as a Cloudflare app. Fluent Form spam protection is really awesome. Try for yourself and see. No site lag, no annoying captcha, etc. Just try it.
We were getting massive amounts of contact form spam on our own site and some client sites, mostly using CF7, and switching them all over to Fluent a few months ago solved it on every site. 🙂
Thank you, thank you! I keep telling people to do exactly this and they don’t listen. They keep messing with recaptcha and math problems, honeypot and paid services and what not.
Johnny, thank you for this post.
I watched your previous review of this plugin and I’m sold on it, it does seem very good – I was about to buy the Pro version until I found a big problem…
Anti-spam is not great for me.
I tried this Fluent Forms on a site we were getting heavily spammed from human spammers, it did NOT stop them.
And in fact, we actually found an INCREASE of spam compared to that of CF7 + reCAPTCHA V3
How? I wondered, so read documentation.
What we discovered was, for automated spam, you have to manually switch on the HoneyPot Spam Protection. Boom… that solves the bots thus far, and I was happy again.
But it does not work out of the box in as you state in a previous comment which is why I’d not checked until then.
But this does not stop human spammers, although Google reCAPTCHA does make it hard for them.
Thankfully, Fluent Forms provides this as an added option – but annoyingly only the old V2, no sign of V3 (invisible, score based). WTF? it’s 2021 in a couple days and V3 has been out since 2018.
So now, my site has the horrible, visible, reCAPTCHA box – client says they’re prefer to have the “human” spam again instead of that box for real customers, so I’m back to considering the likes of Antispam Firewall by Cleantalk, or I roll back to CF7 with V3 reCAP.
It just goes to show, it’s not always perfect. Automated Spam probably is fixed with Fluent forms, but dreadful protection against human spammers in my opinion.
But thanks for your review and suggestion.
Update: I mentioned all this (above) to a colleague who uses Fluent Forms as I mentioned about an ugly “I’m not a robot” box appearing. Whilst agreeing V3 ought to be available, he suggested:
“Make reCAPTCHA only appear when they fill the form, use conditional logic.”
I replied that function is not available on the reCAPTCHA module.
As he found though, it is available on containers which you can place that module into.
Finally, I may now consider buying the Pro version, with Honeypot activated, Google reCAPTCHA but in a conditional logic that only appears on ticking a T&C checkbox, thus making the form look neater on a web site.
Hopefully my problems and solutions might help someone else, as Johnny’s recommendations I usually take good notice of.
Yes, Richard. You have to enable the built-in antispam option. I think it’s 2 checkboxes. Human spammers are hard to stop as you don’t want to block the good humans along with the bad ones. If you’re insisting on the conditional route…I would do your own math problem instead of annoying captcha/recaptcha. Glad you enjoyed this piece.
Hey Johnny
I have moved to using Google Forms with Notifications and works perfectly without the need of an extra plugin.
Have you given it a try?
Thanks 🙂
I haven’t tried, but it sounds cool. I think form plugins give me so much more flexibility, though.
THANK YOU, I have been dealing with a clients site all day, 500+ Russian spam. I was using contact form 7 and several plugins to stop the spam, nothing was working.
I installed Forminator and no spam since.
Congrats, Jason. I know how annoying it is!