CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wordpressformscaptcha
Ephraim
Ephraim

Reputation: 391

Can a captcha attract spam?

I know email forms can attract spam, but can a captcha attract spam?

I have a Wordpress website with 19 contact forms (one for each company advisor). As a test, I put a captcha on ONE of the contact forms to see if that form received less spam than the other forms.

2 months goes by, no spam at all from any of the 19 forms.

Today though, about 10 spam messages were sent through one of the forms. What is odd was that it was ONLY the form that had the captcha that spam was sent though, the other 18 forms were untouched (and they are all just as easy to find).

Any idea why or how this could have happened, and what I can do to prevent it from happening again?

*Edit The page that the captcha/contact form is on is NOT indexed (noindex nofollow with the Yoast plugin).

Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 129

Answers (1)

panza
panza

Reputation: 1431

My first thought would be to make use of the so called invisible captcha or honeypot technique. In a nutshell, the invisible captcha relies on the principle that bots will detect hidden fields and fill in with some information. A human visitor, on the contrary, will never see them (as they are hidden by the CSS), therefore they will remain empty. I am aware of a wordpress plugin for invisible captcha, but it only works on comments and it does not seem to be useful in your case. Hope this is of some help.

Upvotes: 0

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