What is the best solution to protect contact forms from bot requests?

Hello Friends!

I know there is Googles reCapture, but is there another way to protect contact forms from bot requests which looks a bit more professional?

If someone knows a good tutorial for a beginner, please let me know :slight_smile:

Furthermore what is the core technology behind this reCapture technique? Is it plain JavaScript? If so are there other customised solutions to implement on GitHub?

Thank you!!

“Honeypot” is a technique that stops some bots. Does not disturb real visitors. How to create a simple Honeypot to protect your Forms against Spammers - DEV Community

2 Likes

Thanks Sibert!

Thats an interesting solution and I guess that this is the technique used by other professional homepages which dont show up a reCapture Popup. However I am not sure if there is any chance that this technique will delete real customer messages, that would be a no go… Anyway I will learn more about this solution soon.

I am 100 procent confident that no real customers will fill in the hidden fields :slight_smile:

Awesome thanks! I will add it soon :slight_smile:

Honey pot fields are the way to go. Just make sure that you have some placeholder text warning views that it’s a trap. A bot won’t understand it, but I’m not always certain that screen readers or similar technology will obey the hidden field and the client can always use CSS to show hidden items anyway. You don’t want viewers getting trapped inadvertently. If you are really worried about false positives, just store all the info from every form submission (if not already) but use the honey pot to determine whether to send the message to you. You can also look around and hook the harvested info on the spammer into other systems as well.

Or, as some have said elsewhere, you can just leave it and use it as a test that your site is up and running.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.