Form Spammer Trap for Comments

We use a technique that looks for human interaction with the comment form. The name, email, and comment text area plus other required fields are all checked for this human interaction.

The spam bot is redirected to our FormSpammerTrap page at www.FormSpammerTrap.com . The comment is essentially 'thrown away'; it isn't added to your posts' comment. Your site doesn't even see the submission, which might reduce the load on a busy site.

Those techniques just don't work with modern spam-bots. Captchas are easily bypassed. Hidden fields are not hidden to the smarter spam bots, neither are CSS tricks that hide a field from display. And silly questions are just irritating. Our technique requires a human to interact with the form. Form spamming bots can't provide that interaction. And without that human interaction, submitting the form sends the submitter to our FormSpammerTrap.com site. The comment is never saved. So you don't see the form spam.

No, it is only for comments. But we have a free solution on our FormSpammerTrap.com web site that will apply the same techniques to Contact Us forms. It is easy to implement; it's just a template that should work with the theme you are using.

Perhaps. Any plugin that modifies the comment form might interfere with our technique. If you have problems, you can temporarily disable our plugin, or the other comment form plugin, and see if the problem re-occurs. Also, some themes are not well-behaved, and might cause problems. For instance, we have noticed that some themes are doing goofy (non-standard) things with the comment form code, so if required fields are empty when you submit, you get a 'fill in this field' message for a required field rather than getting redirected to the FormSpammerTrap.com site. Nothing we can do about themes that don't follow good WordPress coding practices. But our plugin doesn't interfere with those themes. And a form spammer will still be sent to the FormSpammerTrap.com web site. We have verified that it works properly with the WordPress "Twenty-" themes, plus several others. Let us know if you have other themes where it isn't working properly. The plugin does do some jquery stuff to try to insert the trapping techniques into the comment form. This may allow the plugin to work on many themes that might not stricly follow coding best practices.

As stated above, some themes don't follow proper WordPress coding standards as it relates to supporting changes to the comment form. Because our plugin uses standard WordPress functions to add functionality to the comment form, these themes ignore that standard coding and build their own forms. You can verify this by temporarily changing your theme to one that follows WordPress standards, like the TwentyFifteen theme. If the comment form works properly, then you know that the theme is at fault, not our plugin. If the form still doesn't work with the TwentyFifteen theme, then let us know. The current version of our plugin does bypass some improper theme code as it relates to comment forms.

Our plugin does that too. Most comment form spammers will try to put lots of links in the comment. You can partially block that with the settings in the Discussion menu. We take it a step farther by letting you determine the number of URLs you want in a comment. The plugin then removes or overwrites the excess URLs from the comment.

The plugin provides for that also. You can determine if the excess URLs are deleted, or if they are replaced with '[URL Redacted]' text.

The plugin provides that also. In the FST4c Settings screen (under the Settings menu), you can enter the text that will be displayed before and after the comment form. We don't allow any formatting of that text, to prevent any security problems. Note that a logged-in user won't see the 'before the comment' text; this is a limitation in the WordPress core code.

We've added some new features that allow you to change the text for the comment form, submit button, and more. There are also some tweaks you can enable to allow for how some themes display the comment form. Everything is in the settings screen.

The plugin allows for that. Just leave those fields blank on the plugins' settings screen.

The plugin shows the error message (such as "Please fill out required field (name)") while re-displaying the comment form, with the fields showing the data previously entered. The visitor can just fill in the required fields, and submit again.

You can just deactivate the plugin. Your settings will be saved if you want to reactivate later.

The plugin only adds one 'row' to the Options database, using standard WordPress functions. The plugin will read the values as needed, minimizing calls to the database to limit any overhead against the database.

Not that we are aware of. The things we do are done through standard WordPress calls, plus one bit of "DOM" access, which all modern browsers support. There should be no effect of the plugin on how the visitor interacts with your site. The visitor will not have to have Javascript installed (which is not a good idea in most cases). It works with the standard 'jQuery' code that WordPress already includes and uses.

You can use the plugin support page for questions. Or you can contact us directly via the Contact Us page at www.FormSpammerTrap.com . We usually respond within 24 hours (and are usually faster than that).

It's free, as is the Contact Us form template available on the http://www.FormSpammerTrap.com site. But there is a place to donate there, if you are so inclined. (And we will appreciate that inclination!)

We do lots of WordPress sites: implementation, customization, and more. You can find more info at our business site at www.CellarWeb.com .