by Rick Hellewell 1 (0 reviews)

Form Spammer Trap for Comments

Name: Form Spammer Trap for Comments
Author: Rick Hellewell

Blocks comment spam without captchas, hidden fields, etc. Removes excess URLs from comment area. Set text values for all areas of the comment form.

Form Spammer Trap for Comments ranks #40,707 among WordPress.org plugins with 10+ active installations, is #1,145 of 2,893 in the Discussion & Community category, a 1/5 rating from 0 reviews, and was last updated Mar 2, 2022. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.

Tested up to WP 5.9 (Current: 7.1.1)

vtrunk Current Version vtrunk

Updated 4 years ago Last Update on 02 Mar, 2022

Refreshed 7 hours ago Last Refreshed on

#1,145 of 2,893 in Discussion & Community Top 50% by installs No update in over a year

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Rank

#40,707

— No change

Active Installs

10+

-9.1%

KW Avg Position

— No change

Downloads

2.9K

+1 today

Support Resolved

— No change

Rating

20%

Review 1 out of 5

1 (0 reviews)

Next Milestone 20

Total Progress 10%

10+ 20+

27,445

Ranks to Climb

Growth Needed

8,000,000

Active Installs

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Rank Changes

Current #40,707

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Active Installs Growth

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Active Installs 0,000,000+

Growth +0.0%

Peak 0,000,000

Downloads Growth

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Reviews & Ratings

1.0

0 reviews

Overall 20%

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Plugin Details

Version: trunk
Last Updated: Mar 02, 2022
Requires WP: 4.6+
Tested Up To: 5.9
PHP Version: 7.4 or higher
Author: Rick Hellewell

Support & Rating

Rating: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ 1
Reviews: 0
Support Threads: 0
Resolved: 0%

Keywords

comments form spam spam spambot protection stop

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Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about 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.