Add a spam trap to your form

If your Engaging Networks page is being targeted by spammers, as well as a captcha you could also try adding a form field as a spam trap.

The principle is that, although your human visitors load the page in their browser and fill in the fields they can see, spambots behave differently. They often grab the HTML code of the page, fill in all the form fields they can find in the code (don’t want to miss any mandatory fields!) and submit.

If we set up a form field that is invisible to human users who will therefore never populate it, but visible to spambots who will, then we have a way of differentiating between the two. Then we can just add a validator to the form field: one that checks that it is still empty when the form is submitted. If it isn’t empty, then block the submission!

So it works a little like one of these:

Open

How do I set one up?

Just follow these steps.

1. Create a new custom form validation. For the expression, use this regular expression: ^$

2. Create a new form field and apply this validator to it

3. Add the form field to the form block and hide it with CSS. Setting the form field as hidden won’t work, as it will disable the validator. If you need help with the CSS, your local client support can provide it for you. *MAKE SURE NOT to label it Spam Trap or Honey Pot, as some bots are trained to look for that in the code. Label it something generic that could legitimately be on the page.

4. Test out the page in test mode to make sure you (a human) can still fill it out.