Hi. Despite having captcha, we still have a couple of inquiries a week spamming us by pasting their message in the contact form (web designers, cleaners, animators, shipping, you name it!). I’m wondering if it would be possible to disable pasting into the message field (I assume they are not hand typing their paragraph pitches every time).
Currently our forms are embedded in our WP website. I know you can do this with other forms, but curious if anyone has figured out how to in HS? Thanks in advance!
there are several ways - some of them are easier others might be a bit more tricky.
1. Honeypot method
A honeypot is a trap for bots.
It’s a hidden field that - if filled out - blocks the message.
Unfortunately there is no build in honeypot in HubSpot but you can set it up quite easily by yourself.
Simply create a single-line text/textarea property “honeypot”(or whatever you want to call it), create a workflow with “if honeypot is not filled out/unknown in any form - send mail; otherwise do nothing”
Something like this:
2. API embedded form
If you embed a HubSpot form into a non-HubSpot page you can modify the embed code by following this “modify your embed code”-guide. It’s a lot more of a technical solution but you can create completly custom solutions by this
3. Using third-party solutions
Since you’re working with WordPress you could buy GravityForms(which got a native HubSpot integration), build your forms directly in WordPress and sync all GravityForms fields to your HubSpot fields. The good thing - GravityForms got a build-in Honeypot solution.
Thank you Anton. I hadn’t thought that these could be bots. Just assumed someone was copying and pasting their message.
We have captcha. Would that stop the bots? I’ll look more closely at your solutions, I’m leaning towards 1.
Thanks!
Ryan
one additional thing I forgot:
if you add the honeypot field to a form, make it invisible so real visitors/people won’t see it and therefore the field will be unknown/empty.
Google reCaptcha is one of the greatest solutions available, blocking 99.9%+ of all bots. The honeypot process adds an extra degree of protection since bots will fill it up with information. The workflow will stop it if the field “is known.”. A regular person who does not see the field won’t fill it out and therefore move forward in the workflow.
This honeypot solution with the workflow may be the closest I’ve come to finding a way to filter all the bots filling out our forms. Thank you!!! I’m a little new to this, can you please confirm: when editing the form, we should be able to add an invisible honeypot field? Is that a field we’d have to create or is it an existing property under a name other than “honeypot”?
