A way to prevent spammers?

HI Nancy,

With PayPal Standard, there’s a few things it could be:

1) Real donors who simply don’t finish their donation. Sometimes being redirected to paypal.com is confusing for donors and they just don’t finish.
2) Or spam bots

The best way to prevent spam bots is to enforce a $10 minimum donation amount. They most often do not submit when the amount is that high.

If all else fails you can use this snippet to add a RECAPTCHA to your form (though that is much less than ideal):
https://github.com/WordImpress/Give-Snippet-Library/blob/ede3cfbcba47e27b813c2838149a6ab4d083b5fa/form-customizations/implement-recaptcha.php

If you need guidance implementing custom PHP functions on your website, we have this guide here: https://givewp.com/documentation/resources/adding-custom-functions-to-your-wordpress-website/

Thanks!

Hi, We tried increasing the donation amount but that didn’t help. According to my PM: “What is confusing to me is that they are suggesting we increase the minimum to $10 (which I just did, BTW), but the minimum was @ $1.00 and I am seeing spam donors on the report listed as $0. That would mean that the listings are bypassing that field somehow. ”
By the way, this is only happening on the form we made into a popup using this method: https://givewp.com/load-donation-form-popup-give/
Do you think that has anything to do with it? Or is it just because it’s on our home page? The regular donation form is not experiencing the crazy spam levels.

Interesting. Thanks for reporting that. Have you upgraded to Give 1.8.4 yet? If so we now have “Button Mode” which will allow you to do what that tutorial does but in a more standard way. Perhaps try to swap out that popup form with the new Button Mode and let me know if that helps resolve the issue.

You can read about Button Mode in this documentation article:
https://givewp.com/documentation/core/give-forms/form-display/

Thanks!

thanks, we will try that

Just fyi, we tried using your Button mode, and we are still seeing an outrageous amount of spam on that particular form.

Can you link me to the form so I can take a look?

Sure! I just added captcha to it so hopefully that will stop it. As you said, it’s not ideal, but…

https://www.yesyoucandance.org is the site, and you can see one of the popup donation buttons right above the footer on the home page.

On that note, do you have a method for removing 15 pages worth of fake spam donors? I don’t see any way to clean them out other than individually deleting them. They all have 0 donations for $0 like the one pasted below.
#435 58f889742f849 58f889742f889
View Donor | Notes | Delete
[email protected] 0 $0.00 April 20, 2017

I am currently experiencing the exact same thing! raising the amount over $10 doesn’t seem to help because they aren’t donating anyway?

ThomasFund.org

email addresses appear to be legit, but the names are always a random sequence of letters and numbers over and over again…

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by tjskalka.