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Spam Submissions Slipping Past Akismet

Gravity Support Forums » Plugin Support » Gravity Forms

  1. Goob
    Member

    My gravity forms have been receiving a fair amount of spam submissions lately. They all come from different IPs and email addresses, but they basically have the same spam text in the message. I already have the Akismet integration turned on, but I'm wondering if there are any additional steps I can take. I thought marking the spam messages as spam in my Entries page might "teach" the system that these messages are spam, but so far I've marked 200 over the past month and they're still slipping through.

    Any ideas?

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday May 24, 2012 | Permalink

  2. David Peralty

    Have you thought about adding reCaptcha? Or in the form, if you go to the form settings -> advanced, and enable Spam Honeypot. Between those two things, you could potentially see a huge reduction in spam.

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday May 24, 2012 | Permalink

  3. Goob
    Member

    David, thanks for the reply. I forgot to mention I actually have both of those options activated as well. I've periodically checked to make sure the reCaptcha is working, which it is, so somehow they're slipping past that and the other safeguards as well.

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday May 24, 2012 | Permalink

  4. David Peralty

    Hmm, that really doesn't make sense to me then. With those three tools, they shouldn't be getting through. Is there a keyword in the message that your real users would never use. You could then create a custom validation response making it so that if it has that word, it won't be accepted.

    Can you also post a sample of the spam you are receiving? It might be worth contacting Akismet about as well.

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday May 24, 2012 | Permalink

  5. Goob
    Member

    The major one that gets by is the following. Sometimes the items/prices are changed, but this text seems to be the "standard" spam they like sending me.

    Start Saving Up To 90%
    Off Brand Name Products
    Bid to Win Brand New Products at a Fraction of The Retail Cost. Recently Sold Items iPad 2 $103.00 Brother Sewing Machine $65.06 10K White Gold Diamond Earrings $5.54 $100
    Click Here to Start Saving Today

    The second one is more varied in its text, but it always has to do with penny auction bids. It looks like this

    Free Bid GiveAway
    I am giving up to 50 bids to play in our exciting penny auctions
    to each new free member that joins me. My bids are limited and will be handed out
    on a first come first serve basis. Join Free today to lock in your spot!

    It's clearly automated, as they don't even contain links to their spam sites. Usually the Website form field is populated with my own website's URL.

    I should note that the three anti-spam features are working for the most part. If I look in the spam folder of Gravity Forms, I see a ton of crap that never made it to me. It's just these two types of messages that always seem to get through.

    Posted 11 years ago on Friday May 25, 2012 | Permalink

  6. Carl Hancock
    Administrator

    We have no control over what Akismet does and does not flag as spam. When you mark an item as spam, we do let Akismet know that the item was marked as spam but we have no control over how they handle that. It's a completely closed system that works very well for the most part, but it's not 100% full proof.

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday June 7, 2012 | Permalink

  7. emcmarketing
    Member

    Any additional help here? I've been having the same issue for the last month. I've tried honeypot, recaptcha and akismet. Any other suggestions?

    Posted 11 years ago on Wednesday June 20, 2012 | Permalink

  8. Goob
    Member

    emc, unfortunately it's only gotten worse on my end. I tried creating a Conditional Logic so if the common phrases showed up (Start Saving Up To 90% and Free Bid GiveAway), the submit button would vanish. It worked for a few days and then I suddenly started getting about half a dozen new spam submissions. They're all advertising auction and bid sites, but now the text is switched on a regular basis.

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday June 28, 2012 | Permalink

  9. David Peralty

    Again, as Carl said, there is very little we can do about that. We offer the reCaptcha integration as it should cut down nearly all spam submissions. I'm not sure how they are able to submit without correctly answering the reCaptcha captcha. Akismet should be filtering entries as well.

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday June 28, 2012 | Permalink

  10. emcmarketing
    Member

    @Goob - I've tried everything: including bad behavior plugin for blocking some IPs. Still coming up with spam/garbage. I believe this is being submitted by a human - but I thought blocking IPs might prevent this. But perhaps they're using a Proxy to get around the issue.

    I like your conditional logic idea as a few words always seem to be present. I may try that. Did you write a code snippet for this? Would you mind sharing how you did this. Never mind. I see how it's done. Thanks for the idea! I'll let you know how it works.

    Thanks!

    Posted 11 years ago on Thursday June 28, 2012 | Permalink