The only available spam protection is the invisible Captcha. While this is a good way to prevent spam, it’s also very visible to website users which isn’t something everyone wants to see, visitors and website owners alike. It goes against the visual aesthetic of an embedded form.
I would like to see a “Honeypot” option for spam protection on HubSpot forms. A honeypot field is a very common alternate approach to spam protection. I’m actually surprised HubSpot doesn’t have this already built-in, because it is so common. It works by creating an invisible field that humans don’t see but bots do. If a bot fills out the field, the honeypot validation disables the ability for the form to be submitted and blocks the spam. A honeypot works very well in most cases and is truly invisible to the end-user.
If a honeypot field can’t be added directly, a next-best option might be to have the ability to set logic on a HubSpot field to hide or disable the submit button if a field has been filled out. In this way, a honeypot could be created by adding a field and making it hidden, then setting the logic on the field to disable the submit button if it has been filled out. JotForms has this type of functionality and [here’s a documented example](Login · Jotform).
In summary:
Who is it for: Marketers and anyone creating forms
What is the goal: An alternative form of spam protection
Value: Truely invisible with no captcha branding going against the form aesthetic
Another vote in favor of this request! We’ve had a dramatic uptick in spam submissions over the last month, despite having recaptcha enabled, and blocking domains or specific emails is tedious and ineffective when a different address is used each time. I am going to have to find a manual coding option now because we cannot rely on HubSpot to filter out or prevent the spam form submissions.
We are suffering from the same recurring spam every night. While the email addresses may look legit, they are almost always invalid when looked up against an MX lookup process. If the address comes back as “bad” or “unknown” then the address is very likely just spam. This has got to be one of the simplest checks to add to forms. I was actually surprised when I checked the addresses that they weren’t legit since I would have considered that a basic check in modern times.
Using the honeypot field approach would be an even stronger deterent against bots but I think most of our spam is coming from human click farms and might not be all that effective. I would take anything at this point since the absurdity of adding blocklist domains has now reached hundreds (plus the free domains). The current tools provided by Hubspot may have been sufficient a few years ago but they are pretty near useless today given known workarounds.
Hey all… Like everyone on this thread we suffer from a bunch of spam. I moved off HubSpot forms and use Elementor Forms instead. It has better functionality, more features and honeypot. The nice thing, of course, is that HubSpot can read the form and bring it right into the CRM. Give it a try!
Another vote for this feature. We get 30+ spam form submissions a day. It’s getting ridiculous, I’ve blocked 30+ domains but they just keep coming. We also have captcha enabled and it does nothing.
I agree with everything that has been wrote her. For the last two weeks, about 80 percent of our MQLs are spam despite using the ReCaptcha. There just has to be a way of using honeypot to get this sorted out, because as Neringa said, we spend a lot of money in Google Ads for those and it just destroys every statistic, budget planing and analysis.
Had a huge issue with spam recently - frustrating as we’re obviously paying for these conversions. I’ve done everything I can outside of hubspot (amended Google Ads locations and researching spam bot trackers)
Please add this feature or improve your Recaptcha process!
Couldn’t agree more. Our spam rates have increased massively lately and the recaptcha and domain blocks have been in place for ages and are simply not doing their job properly. HubSpot need to take spam seriously and find better solutions such as honeypots.
Upvoting here. We’ve had endless spam lately, Captcha and blocking free email addresses isn’t working anymore. Need additional options to reduce this endless spam.