I keep getting spam responses to my captcha protected Simple Contact Form

Hey @elliekennard,

Thank you for contacting us and we’re sorry for the trouble!

We’ve recently been seeing an increase in reports from users who use reCAPTCHA and how they’re receiving more SPAM. This unfortunately is an issue with Google and it’s possible there was a recent vulnerability exploited to allow bots to bypass this.

We’ve also noticed that most of the reports are from users who have the Invisible reCaptcha setup. In case this is what you are using at the moment, you might want to consider switching to the Checkbox reCaptcha. We have a comprehensive guide on how to get that set up here.

As a safety measure, we also recommend increasing the security level of the reCAPTCHA integration on your site. You can do this by going to your reCAPTCHA account. Then in the settings of your current integration, you can make adjustments to the Security Preference slider.

And if you’d prefer not to use reCAPTCHA, we have another anti-spam protection feature, hCaptcha. This is a good option if you’d prefer not to sign up for Google’s reCAPTCHA service. Within your forms, hCaptcha will display a checkbox asking users to prove they’re human (much like Google’s v2 Checkbox reCAPTCHA). We have a detailed guide for setting up hCaptcha.

Alternatively, you can consider the third-party plugins such as WordPress Zero Spam or Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk which work out of the box to protect your forms against spam.

Hope this helps!

Thanks, didn’t get notified of your response, but will now try to implement your suggestions.
Cheers
Ellie

Hey @elliekennard,

Sure – please feel free to let me know how it goes!

Kindly,

Hi @prashantrai

I have got those spams down to 2 or 3 a day, by increasing to the highest security setting on the Google Checkbox reCaptcha account. I was not using the invisible.

It is very strange that I use these forms on 2 sites and one gets daily spams (the link in the email), the other gets none.

I will see about other spam reducing plugins next, but have had so much to do lately that I had to let this wait.

Thanks again,

Ellie

Hey @elliekennard – I apologize for the trouble you’re facing, please let us know how it goes when you get a chance to test the other spam prevention tools.

Kindly,

Hey @elliekennard – We haven’t heard back from you in about a week, so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread for now. But if you’d like us to assist further, please feel welcome to continue the conversation.

Thanks!

Thanks @prashantrai
I will give those a try now while you remind me.
Cheers
Ellie

Can you run those anti spam plugins at the same time? Such as Akismet plus other(s)? @prashantrai

Hey @elliekennard – Thanks for following on this ticket!

I apologize, at this moment we don’t have a native integration with Akismet, though it’s on our developer’s radar. However, we’ve received feedback that Akismet works fine with the rest of the plugins. In this case, you can set up Akismet on a testing server and see if there’s any conflict showing up. In case everything is working fine, you can implement the plugin on the production website.

Kindly,