Tired of spammers making quick work of your WordPress forms? Automated bots are the leading cause of spam attacks. Not only do the bots clog up your database with bogus submissions, but they can do serious harm to your website. From code insertion to slowing your site down, spambots can and will impact your site if you are not careful.
How can you protect your website from spam? One of the first steps is to secure your forms. Forms are a great way for bots to abuse your site. They can run a series of automated scripts to fill in form fields and submit over and over again. Fortunately, there are several ways to combat this and secure your form.
Google ReCaptcha
Google’s reCaptcha is perhaps the most well-known spam protection tool out there. If you have ever ordered something online or attempted to log on to a site you have experienced reCaptcha. It is often seen as the obscure-looking text that you have to re-enter before logging in. Sometimes it asks you to select photos from a grid that contains a certain object.
While effective on bots, for the average human they can be somewhat frustrating. I, for one, have been stumped countless times trying to figure out what photos contain a stoplight in them. ReCaptcha can add over 30 seconds to the user’s session trying to solve one.
A New Way to Protect Your Site
Is keeping your site secure at the expense of user experience a compromise you aren’t willing to take? Luckily for you, weForms has partnered with an excellent alternative to reCaptcha. We are happy to announce we are now integrated with Human Presence Anti-Spam.
Human Presence Anti-Spam for WordPress is a plugin designed to protect your WordPress site from spammers in a more streamlined manner. Using a proprietary bot analysis technology, Human Presence Anti-Spam can detect the slightest hint of bot activity, in turn blocking spammy comments or form submissions from occurring. This means fewer junk submissions and more real submissions as your users won’t become frustrated identifying a crosswalk in nine blurry pictures.
weForms Integration with Human Presence Anti-Spam
Interested in getting your weForms WordPress contact forms protected? Fortunately for you, it only takes a few minutes. To begin the process, you will need to have both weForms and the Human Presence Anti-Spam plugin installed on your site. Once you have Human Presence Anti-Spam installed, you simply need to log in or sign up for an account.
Once installed, you can navigate to the Human Presence Anti-Spam option on the WordPress dashboard. There you will see a list of forms and other areas such as comments that you can enable Human Presence Anti-Spam for. In this case, select the form(s) you wish to protect by toggling the On/Off switch. This will automatically enable spam protection for your selected form.
If you want to automatically enable it for all forms or adjust the confidence threshold level, you can do so via the Human Presence Anti-Spam settings menu. By adjusting the confidence threshold, you are changing the minimum percentage of confidence acceptable before failing the validation. This means if you are receiving complaints that real humans are getting blocked, you can change the number.
Now that you have enabled protection on the form and optionally adjusted the confidence level, you can go to your form to confirm it is enabled. To do so, simply navigate to your weForms form via the WordPress dashboard, click edit, and you will see your form. On the form editor, you will notice a hidden field with Human Presence Anti-Spam shown at the bottom of your form. This confirms that it is on your form and that the end-user cannot see it, as designed.