How to Prevent Spam Form Submissions?

Prevent spam submissions refers to protecting your online form from fake entries, harmful links, or other malicious activities using various methods. Spam submissions are done by both bots and humans.

Automatic submissions are held by programmed bots, which submit hundreds of fake entries in minutes and are a common way of spam submissions. Fake entries are often used to boost SEO, steal site information or restrict access to a website.

It is important to prevent spammers from submitting forms on your site. This action fills your website with junk and harmful links, which reduces your performance and search engine ranking. You can use different methods to detect or stop spammers with multi-steps forms, Google reCaptcha, location based form and the honeypot method.

What is Spam Form Submission?

Spam form submissions are unwanted and often automatic entries in online form with malicious intent. They come from both humans and bots flooding your form with unsolicited content, advertising, or injecting harmful links.

Spam submissions are mainly of two types:

• Manual Spamming: Manual spamming refers to the process of submitting online forms manually with false information. It is very difficult to detect because humans can easily bypass many spam detectors.
• Automatic Form Submission: These are the software that searches the internet for Forms and automatically fills them. These spambots submit hundreds of form entries in minutes and flood your system with junk.

What are the reasons behind Spam Form Submission?

There are several reasons behind spam form submissions.

• Spammers submit links to their websites to boost search engine optimization (SEO).
• Spammers may submit malicious links through your form to inject viruses, steal information or restrict access to your website.
• Spammers use submissions to get email addresses from auto-replay or databases.
• Spammers may submit fake leads or junk entries to waste resources.

Why is it important to prevent spam form submission?

Preventing spam form submission is important because it protects your website from irrelevant messages, malicious content, data theft, and junk entries. Here are some reasons why it is important to prevent spam from submissions.

• Save Your Time: Going through fake leads and content submissions wastes time and makes it harder to identify real customers.
• Spam skews form data: Fake submissions can skew your website data and fill the database with misleading and wrong information.
• Reduce Inbox Clutter: Spam submissions can flood your inbox with unwanted emails and makes it harder to find or respond to real customer inquiries, which leads to delay in communication and missed opportunities.

What are the different ways to prevent Spam Form Submission?

1. Use Multi-step Forms: Multi-step forms makes the fill up process harder to complete for spambots. These spambots are designed to fill out and submit forms as fast as possible, and multi-step forms slow them down, making them less effective. Multiple steps reduce the risk of spam and protect your form from automatic bot spam submission.

2. Location-Based Form: You can restrict form submission based on the user's location using IP tracking and geo-location. If you notice spams are coming from a particular country or region, filter submissions from that particular location can help reduce spam. This method is useful for businesses that serve only for specific geographic areas.

3. Google reCAPTCHA: Google reCAPTCHA is one of the best ways to prevent spam form submissions on your website. It only appears on your website when it detects any suspicious activity such as too many login attempt or sudden increase in traffic from a single IP address.

It requires users to complete challenges like identify images or click a checkbox (I'm not a robot). Google reCAPTCHA runs in the background and assigns a score to each user, blocking suspicious activities automatically.

4. Ask Simple Question: Ask simple questions like ‘what is 4+6?’ or ‘how many letters are in the word computer?’ to complete the form fill up process that can block most of the bots as they are not programmed to fill these types of sections. These bots are designed to fill out simple fields like name, age, or email address. Ensure the question is easy to understand for all users and if you're running a multi-language form then translate these questions too.

5. Blocking Specific Email or IP Addresses: If you notice spam coming from specific email or IP addresses, block these addresses from accessing your form or flag them as spammers. You can use plugins or web hosting services as they allow you to create blacklists to prevent submissions from these addresses.

6. The Honeypot Method: The honeypot method traps bots with hidden form fields. Since humans are not able to see these fields and it remains unfilled, whenever these fields are filled, you know that you got a spam submission. Any submission that contains data in the honeypot field is automatically considered spam and rejected.

7. Plugins and Anti-spam Services: Many plugins or third-party services offer comprehensive spam protector services. If you are using platforms like WordPress or Shopify, there are various spam protector plugins or services. You can also use cloud-based anti-spam solutions that detect and block spam form submissions in real time.

8. Use Cloudflare Turnstile: Cloudflare is an alternative to CAPTCHA and used to trap spam bots and fake form submissions. It automatically detects and filters out bot activity with minimal or no user interaction in most cases.