Block contact form spam attacks are automated computer programs that search the internet for forms, comment sections, and other avenues to spam people with junk text or links. Alternatively, these malicious programs can attempt to steal personal information or hijack control of a website.

Regardless of the type of attack, spam can damage a site’s reputation by burying legitimate submissions in a mountain of junk messages. It can also cause a productivity drain by taking time away from important work or building relationships with real customers.

The best way to stop contact form spam attacks is by deploying multiple strategies to detect and block these automated programs. One of the most effective tactics is using a form validation tool that sanitizes submission data before it’s stored on your server. This will remove most of the spammy information, and prevent a spambot from exploiting vulnerabilities in your form’s code to send malicious scripts to your visitors’ computers.

Using APIs to Verify if a Phone Number is Active

Another effective strategy is to use a spam filter that checks for specific keywords in submissions. For example, WPForms includes a keyword filter that can block spammers who try to submit a contact form with words like ‘email’ or ‘website’. This filter can help to identify a larger percentage of contact form spam than a simple CAPTCHA test alone.

Lastly, a spam filter that uses rate limiting to limit the number of times an IP address can submit a form within a certain period is another good option to reduce spam. This technique takes into account that humans generally submit forms at a slower pace than robots, and tries to slow down the process by limiting the amount of submissions allowed in a minute. This can help to prevent an entire wave of spam from spreading across your website in seconds, and it’s easy to implement in the WPForms dashboard.