Joris Le Blansch

<p>I like to use Contact Form 7 on most of my WordPress sites. It’s a powerful form manager that suits all my needs. I don’t like to use external calls to protect the forms from spam submissions though (like reCaptcha or hCaptcha) and don’t want to present a manual captcha to a user (math or other puzzle). Since I couldn’t find a really basic honeypot script that works on most entries, I created one here. Hopefully it’s useful to someone else also.</p>
<h3>Setup</h3>
<ul>
<li>Install the plugin using the regular plugin setup routine or upload the entire apiosys-honeypot-cf7 folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.</li>
<li>Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in WordPress, you MUST have Contact Form 7 AND Flamingo installed and enabled.</li>
<li>Add the following shortcodes to your Contact Form 7 forms:</li>
</ul>
<p>[honeypot] – Adds the hidden honeypot field<br />
[timestamp] – Adds time-based validation</p>
<ul>
<li>Complete the rest of the options which you can find in Admin > Contact > Honeypot. A generally good working set of values is enabled by default there.</li>
</ul>
<h3>What tests are used?</h3>
<ul>
<li>A Honeypot Field</li>
<li>A Checkbox Trap</li>
<li>Time-Based Validation</li>
<li>Email domain Check</li>
<li>Basic Content Analysis</li>
</ul>
<h3>Does it really work?</h3>
<p>It has been tested on several high-traffic WP sites. I see a return of ~ 1 ‰ (i.e. 1 in a thousand) of spam going through. That usually corresponds to humans paid to fill forms or sophisticated bots. Please feel free to contribute to make it even better. You can contribute directly <a href="https://github.com/apio-sys/apiosys-honeypot-cf7" rel="nofollow ugc">here</a>.</p>


Apio systems – Honeypot for Contact Form 7

Basic Honeypot plugin for Contact Form 7 to drastically reduce spam on form submissions without user interaction.

WEB-SHOP-HOSTING

<p>The plugin adds two new Widgets to the Elementor-PRO Forms builder.<br />
– <strong>Phone Country Code</strong> – choosing a telephone prefix depending on the country<br />
– <strong>DropZone</strong> – Drag & Drop multiple file upload field<br />
– <strong>Advanced Honeypot</strong> – Improved up-to-date spam filtering</p>
<h4>Phone Country Code</h4>
<ul>
<li>Telephone prefix depending on the country.</li>
<li>Provides the ability to select a searchable telephone prefix.</li>
<li>The search works both by prefix number and by country name.</li>
<li>The standard for WP language file is used, then it allows to translate the selector depending on the change of the locale inside WP.</li>
<li>In the display of countries there is a flag image, which makes it easier to find and makes it richer. When displaying an empty value, there is an automatic determination of the current country using geolocation based on IP identification.<br />
<span class="embed-youtube" style="text-align:center; display: block;"><iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZR9bkXPnsuc?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe></span></li>
</ul>
<h4>DropZone</h4>
<ul>
<li>File will be shown in Elementor -> Submission</li>
<li>File can be send by email<br />
<span class="embed-youtube" style="text-align:center; display: block;"><iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JSFna01AnwM?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe></span></li>
</ul>
<h4>Advanced Honeypot – better reCaptcha alternative</h4>
<p>We added an advanced honeypot widget to elementor pro forms.<br />
<span class="embed-youtube" style="text-align:center; display: block;"><iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/102sMMmQsPA?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe></span><br />
This widget is very similar to the native elementor widget, except for very important differences.<br />
Elementor Form fields can be required or optional.<br />
Spiders that send spam through forms take into account the presence of traps and try to bypass them, for example,<br />
they check for the presence of required fields in form and fill in only its so as not to fall into honeypot spam filters.<br />
The honeypot field that the elementor provides can only be optional, because if you make it required,<br />
normal visitors will not be able to fill it out, since it is not displayed on the front (it is hidden) and the form simply will not submit by the browser, since the required fields are checked by the browser (even invisible).<br />
At the same time, it turns out that the optional fields are not filled with spiders just to bypass the honeypot.<br />
Our honeypot implementation is different in that the honeypot field is always shown as required for spiders, but then this attribute is removed using JavaScript.<br />
The spider reads only the html and sees that the field is required and fills it in, this causes the spam filter to work. For real visitors,<br />
this field is invisible and JavaScript removes the mandatory attribute for this field, i.e. spam filter is not activated.<br />
In addition, the native honeypot field has a “display: none;” style written directly into the input tag that clearly tells the spiders that the field is not visible to users and is a potential trap.<br />
In our version of the widget, the honeypot field is hidden through styles that are in a common style block that is difficult for spiders to find our traps field.</p>


Startklar Elementor Addons

The plugin expands the Elementor-PRO Forms builder with Country Code selector, DropZone and Advanced Honeypot.

Apio systems – Honeypot for Contact Form 7 vs Startklar Elementor Addons