Lately, I got a lot of spam emails into my inbox, coming from the contact forms on my website. At first,  I ignored all of it, because it was 1 every week. But suddenly, I started to get dozens of spam messages every day. The good part is that I am the only one who receive those spam messages, and all of them got into the spam folder ( due to the content ). The bad part is that the IP Address of the website might get banned and marked in blacklists.

A simple solution to this is to use a captcha. In wordpress, most contact form plugins have captcha support. But since I hate captcha, I don’t want to annoy others with it. I searched for a better solution. Spam bots that are accesing the website only to send some automated spam messages have a behaviour that a human can’t have. For example, they don’t load javascripts or images, they want only the html code. Having this in mind, it is simple to catch them, a simple javascript code that have to be run and produce a result, inserted in any page, can figure out if behind the computer who access the page is a human or not. This technique is called as honeypot.

Fortunately, I was using Contact Form 7, and there is another plugin that will add honeypot functionality to the plugin. Simple as always, with 1 click you can resolve many issues in wordpress.