Stop Contact form 7 Spam on WordPress
Spam is an annoying issue with contact forms on WordPress websites. Contact Form 7 is the most popular, free plugin for WordPress, and is targeted by spammers. WordPress form & comments spam bots are focused in two areas: malicious phishing and black hat SEO. The two strategies can cause websites with high traffic to receive hundreds if not thousands of spam emails daily. WordPress website owners and developers then have issues figuring out what messages are real among the spam.
Contact Form 7: The Most Popular, Free Forms Plugin
Contact Form 7 has been around for a while and has become the most popular free forms plugin on the WordPress market. One of the top reasons why CF7 is so popular is it is bundled with many WordPress themes as the preferred forms plugin out of the box. While the Contact Form 7 plugin is highly versatile and has integrated with many important tools, it does have vulnerabilities to form spam.
Contact Form 7 Spam Issues
With great popularity comes a great opportunity for spambots to exploit plugins. Contact Form 7 suffers from highly targeted spammers who know websites are using the plugin. WordPress websites with CF7 installed typically get multiple spam emails or comments daily. Recommended methods for stopping Contact Form 7 spam are using CF7 Honeypot, Simple Recaptcha, and Akismet. The only problem is these “solutions” can only help WordPress websites eliminate some form & comments spam. This is why we developed our Human Presence Anti-Spam WordPress plugin to help eliminate 99% of contact form 7 spam.
Human Presence Anti-Spam Plugin for Contact Form 7
Human Presence was developed due to the growing threat of spambots and malicious threats that website developers and eCommerce shop owners face today. Bots are getting smarter and finding ways to evade advanced detection techniques like Akismet Anti-Spam, Google Recaptcha, and others. Bots are also being used to wreck eCommerce flash sales and markets for specific products. The biggest problem with today’s current solutions is that they are stagnant and not getting smarter as bots continue to evolve with the help of hackers and AI. We developed Human Presence to help website owners protect their site with an invisible solution that works in the background, allowing visitors to interact with the website without the hassle of a Turing test.
How does Human Presence work?
Unlike other WordPress anti-spam plugins, we use a “human presence” approach, essentially mapping natural, organic movements and apply the logic to all future site visits. The technology is constantly getting smarter and identifies bots within milliseconds. The behavioral analysis algorithm eliminates false positives with real human visitors to block spam in your WordPress comments and contact forms. Like the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin, we crowdsource our human behavior database from all the websites using Human Presence so that our technology is always getting smarter against spambots. The difference is our database cannot be manipulated like the text-based Akismet spam database. With our advanced risk detection and machine learning techniques, Human Presence is the only solution for complete spam prevention for WordPress.
How much does Human Presence cost?
Human Presence has a comparable pricing structure to other anti-spam WordPress plugins. We do allow every website owner to install the plugin and protect one form for free to test it out. Once you are truly impressed, you can sign up for our annual protection plan to protect unlimited forms on one website for $100 per year. Are you a WordPress agency interested in protecting multiple client sites from spam? Check out our Agency Pricing, here.
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