Are your contact forms filled with spam?

Are your contact forms being filled with so much spam that spotting a genuine enquiry is virtually impossible? 

Worse still are you getting sent an email each time the form is submitted and your mailbox is also suffering?

We noticed this was becoming increasingly problematic on our customer's and our own websites over the last few years so needed to deal with this. 'Luckily' Populate's structure meant we could deal with this with one solution and all of our customer benefitted immediately.

All form submissions in Populate are stored in the site's database and any number of recipients can be set up to receive a notification by email

We added Google reCAPTCHA 3 to all forms which gives a s core from 0 (bot) to 100 (human). The administrator can then choose a threshold for each form below which the submission is treated as spam. If it is spam the submission is moved into the spam folder and the recipient emails are not sent.

This has proved remarkably successful and allows us to deal with genuine enquiries far more effectively.

Somehow our general contact form has ended being heavily targeted with spam. Yesterday (05 March 24) it received 98 spam and 3 genuine enquiries. The spam filtering did exactly what it was supposed to, and I received 3 emails that I was able to act upon. I guess at some point we will need to do something about this, move the page or form, or introduce further measures into the spam filtering. At the moment however, its easier to just glance in the spam folder every few days and hit 'Delete all'.

We will of course be keeping on top of this, as the situation develops we will adapt our routines to keep ahead and to deliver the best service possible to our current and future customers.