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Gravity Forms + reCAPTCHA Not Working Anymore?

Do you have a reCAPTCHA widget installed on your forms and are still getting tons of spam submissions?

Well, if you use Gravity Forms as your form builder, you’re in luck!

Here at Michael Mackenzie Communications, we use Gravity Forms on all of the websites we build. In my opinion, it’s by far the most robust form builder plugin for WordPress. There is also a vibrant Gravity Forms ecosystem out there to extend Gravity Forms’ functionality.

If you’re curious, check out:

Gravity Wiz

Gravity View

Earlier this year, we noticed several of our clients were getting an unusually large number of spam form submissions.

From the nature of the submissions, it was clear they were coming from spam bots. We saw a lot of submissions having the message field populated with ads, promotions and sketchy (mostly Russian) website links.

We had Google’s reCAPTCHA widget installed and even implemented Gravity Form’s native Honeypot feature.

With the built-in Honeypot feature enabled, the form will include a field that is hidden from visitors but is visible to bots. If this field contains a value when the form is submitted the submission will be ignored; the entry is not saved, notifications, and add-ons are not processed.

But we were still getting the spam submissions.

What to do?

While researching the issue, I stumbled across the free Gravity Forms Zero Spam plugin by Gravity View.

It was worth a shot. The plugin was free and well-rated, so we installed it on a couple of the affected websites.

The result was immediate. No more robot spam submissions. Full Stop!

That was about four months ago and still, no robot spam submissions.

Now, that being said, you may still get some spam submissions. But these are likely to have been filled out manually. Unfortunately, there is not a lot you can easily do about those. If someone is willing to take the time to hand type spam content into your form, it will have a better chance of getting through.

If you use a different form builder there may be a tool to stop robot spam, either natively or with an addon.

However, I know this tool works for us. But remember, it only works for Gravity Forms.

This post is courtesy of MMC Web Manager Kerry Wolfe

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