Honeypot for Contact Form 7

This simple addon module to the wonderful Contact Form 7 (CF7) plugin adds basic honeypot anti-spam functionality to thwart spambots without the need for an ugly captcha.

The principle of a honeypot is simple — bots are stupid. While some spam is hand-delivered, the vast majority is submitted by bots scripted in a specific (wide-scope) way to submit spam to the largest number of form types. In this way they somewhat blindly fill in fields, regardless of whether the field should be filled in or not. This is how a honeypot catches the bot — it introduces an additional field in the form that if filled out will trigger the honeypot and flag the submission as spam.

Additionally, as of version 2.1, the plugin also features an optional submission time check. This checks how long it takes to submit the form and if under a user-defined threshold, it rejects the submission as spam. This works under the idea (backed up by testing) that spam bots submit forms super fast (usually 1-2 seconds), whereas people take longer.

REQUIRED/RECOMMENDED PLUGINS

You will need Contact Form 7 version 3.0+ at a minimum. It is recommended to use version 5.3+ of CF7, for better spam logging. For the best results, we suggest always using the latest versions of WordPress and CF7.

We highly recommend Flamingo with CF7 and this plugin. Using Flamingo allows you to track spam submissions (via inbound messages / spam tab in Flamingo), showing you what got caught in the honeypot and why. Be sure to check your Honeypot settings to turn storing the honeypot on for this.

SUPPORT / SOCIALS

Support can be found here. Follow us on Twitter and on Facebook for updates and news.

Visit the Honeypot for Contact Form 7 plugin page for additional information or to buy us a coffee to say thanks.

PRIVACY

This plugin does not track users, store any user data, send user data to external servers, nor does it use cookies. This is an addon plugin, and requires Contact Form 7. Please review Contact Form 7’s privacy policies for more information.

LOCALIZATION / TRANSLATION

If you’d like to translate this plugin, please visit the plugin’s translate.wordpress.org page. As of v1.10, all translation is handled there. Version 2.0 brings a bunch of new strings in need of translation, so a huge thank you to the polyglots that contribute!

LEGACY/OLD VERSIONS

The latest version of this plugin is designed to work with the latest version of Contact Form 7 and WordPress. If you are using older versions of either, you’re best to find the version of this plugin released around the same time as the version you’re using. You can access older versions of this plugin by clicking Advanced View on the right of the plugin’s page and scrolling to the bottom of the plugin’s page. Use at your own risk. We strongly recommend upgrading to the latest versions whenever possible.