Contact form spam is annoying and may even pose a security risk to your site. Blocking spam while keeping forms accessible is a top priority for Caldera Forms, To enable powerful anti-spam on your contact form, create a new form. That’s it, you’re done! Anti-spam is on by default. If for some reason you’d like to turn off anti-spam, you can from the “Form Settings” panel of the form. But don’t, spam is annoying.
What To Do If You Are Getting Spam With Caldera Forms?
If you are using the default honey pot anti-spam with Caldera Forms and it is not effective, there are several approaches you can take:
- Use a good managed WordPress host that blocks bots from reaching your site. We recommend Pantheon and WPEngine for this reason, in addition to providing great hosting at a reasonable price. We use both of those hosts for our sites, and experience very little spam.
- Use an anti-spam plugin. See the list of anti-spam plugins below. Many of our users report great success with these plugins. We do not use any of them, because the default anti-spam honey pot combined with the measures listed in items 1 and 2 of this doc are sufficient for us.
What Happened To The reCaptcha Field?
We disabled adding new reCaptcha fields to forms. If you had one in an old form, it will still show up because we don’t want to affect layouts. You should manually remove it. Captchas are less effective than our default anti-spam, more annoying and reCaptcha requires loading additional JavaScript, which adds to page load time.
Other Plugins For Caldera Forms Anti-Spam
- Akismet – When the popular anti-spam plugin Akismet is active, a special Akismet processor is added to your forms.
- Clean Talk Anti-Spam – The WordPress plugin for this service integrates with Caldera Forms, and comment forms.
Other Recommendations
Use A Web Application Firewall
Spam happens because a spam bot reached your site, and then other anti-spam measures failed. A good web application firewall will block the bad bots from even getting to your site. This is not only helpful for preventing spam, it also will help the security and performance of your site. You can learn more about how to setup CloudFlare to protect your WordPress site here.
Use A Quality Web Host
A quality Managed WordPress host can also help defeat the spam monster. A good host will provide a web application firewall and other fine tuning to solve common WordPress issues, including spam. Here are the hosts we would trust a WordPress site with: