Not blocking SPAM

I’m having the same issue – multiple spam emails every day; can’t be sure they’re not automated, but then I only started getting them after removing my email address from my site and using Contact7 forms, very recently. Honeypot not having an impact.

Have you both tried renaming the Honeypot field to something that spam bots might find more enticing? By default the Honeypot shortcode (in the CF7 editor) looks something like: [honeypot honeypot-948]

That will give the field (when rendered in the HTML form) a name of “honeypot-948”. That’s not great. It’s easy for spambots to avoid fields named “honeypot” and it’s also not something a spambot would necessarily try to fill in.

Instead, try something like: [honeypot url-948] or [honeypot email-948]

These are more likely to trap the spambot and block the spam form submissions.

@ryan, you know… when I created the field I thought “it calls itself honeypot – isn’t that just alerting the spam bots to the fact it is a honeypot field.. Should I change it… Nah, the plugin author wouldn’t name it honeypot if it were likely to cause problems…” … I should’ve listened to my gut!

It completely makes sense – I have now updated it … Fingers crossed that is the key!

Thanks for your help!

Lol, yeah. The shortcode gets named based on the identification of the plugin to CF7, and so because the plugin is called “honeypot”, that’s the default field name. There’s some instructions under where that field gets filled out, but they’re easy to miss. Will look into seeing if I can change the default with the next update to avoid confusion down the road.

It’s been 2 weeks and I haven’t had a spam message since making the change!

Thanks for your help

Just activated the latest CF7 Honeypot Plugin on the latest WP 4.3.1 and followed what the video shows and what was said here in this forum. Changed name to something like [Honeypot email-534]. Is there something else I need to do?

Now I get more Spam than I ever have. HELP

This thread has been marked as resolved so there’s a good chance the plugin author wont bother reading it again as he’s fixed the problem. I

If you have an issue, it’s best practise to start a new thread of your own as you could have a different issue even if they look the same to you.

I will also point out that it is possible to use Honeypost and Google no CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA on the same form. I have those two plus an Akismet validation of names and e-mails on my forms. That way, the spambots that learn to avoid one trap get stopped by another.

Check out the following plug-ins to add the above spam prevention methods to your form:

• Better WordPress reCAPTCHA
• Contact Form 7 reCAPTCHA extension
• Akismet

Also, make sure that you have in fact added Honeypot, Google no CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA, and Akismet to your forms. Each of these requires editing of the forms (not just installation) to accomplish. Check the documentation for the edits needed.

Thanks @jamieisboss.

Also thanks @carolwp for sharing your setup. I agree it’s absolutely essential to have a multi-prong defence when it comes to spam.

@dawgpack — that should do it. Has CF7 form spam decreased?