Simple Spam Prevention On Forms

Marketing & Content Hub Lead Capture Tools
1

Greetings Fellow HubSpot nerds!

I wanted to make a post about this just to see if, like me, you have made some simple means to prevent spam to share with the community.

Admittedly, it’s a bit annoying to have to add a field for users to fill out when they are already doing a reCapcha but it truly crushed our spam problem so it’s worth it for us!

Here are the steps we took to get it done:

  1. Make a new ticket property for your test question – it will need to be a “number” type. I labeled mine “what_is_7_minus_2”
  2. Go to your form and add the “what_is_7_minus_2” property to your form.
  3. Make the “what_is_7_minus_2” field required
  4. Go down and select the checkbox to “Set limits on the numbers accepted” and set it to the answer to our question “7-2” which equals “5” so make it so the lowest number submitable is “5” and the highest number submitable is also “5”. This way, a user must input “5” in order to submit the form.
  5. Save and publish!

Would love to see any other honeypot or spam prevention tactics for forms if y’all know any. :raising_hands:

2

Hello @HubSpotNerd happy Friday!

Thank you for sharing the steps you took to prevent spam forms! I want to share this knowledge base here with more information about it. I want to invite our top experts to this conversation @TomM2 @AdityaBansal any recommendations to @HubSpotNerd matter?

Thank you,

Pam

3

@PamCotton @TomM2 and @AdityaBansal

A pleasure to meet you!

As someone who implemented all of the suggestions within that linked knowledge base you shared, I think a great solution would be to add a test question and honeypot option to the form builder instead of just a reCapcha and email domain filter. The spam submission quantity, for us, was unacceptable prior to implementing our test question workaround.

As clever as this test question workaround may be though, it would be far easier for the average user, and ourselves, to be able to just click “add honeypot” or “add bot test question” in the form builder and let users choose from a drop down of a few different options.

Gotta stay ahead of these dastardly bots!

Just my two cents regarding that knowledge base and the form builder in hubspot as it stands :call_me_hand: Hope y’all had a nice weekend

–HubSpotNerd