Add honeypot to form for spam protection.

[Vedant]

Hi, 

We've been experiencing a surge in spam form submissions and we are also looking at ways to detect and block leads that contain excessive profanity and the captcha doesn't seem to provide us the solution we are looking for at the moment. Is there a way we an add honeypot option for spam protection on HubSpot forms?

[FCorbaci]

Hey there,

Honeypot won't help with your problem either. The guides given by @jolle should be helpful, right now we are collecting forms with Elementor and using an add-on to block some domains, message field content etc. Spams usually have a pattern so by using active lists you should be able to block 90% of them. A quick google search can provide a list of domains to block, if you can't find anything, drop me an email and I will share with you what I have now and you can use that list of domains as starters.

Cheers

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @Vedant, thanks for reaching out! This is a super valid concern and something that a bunch of other users have talked about. Unfortunately, there isn't a perfect solution here or a way to integrate anything other than CAPTCHA with HubSpot forms. Here are some (hopefully) helpful resources:

1. Another HubSpot Community thread on this topic with great insights from @danmoyle and @karstenkoehler 
2. HubSpot's Knowledge Base article on preventing spam form submissions

The big recommendations are:

1. Blocking free email providers/requiring a business email address (if you're able to do so)
2. Tracking spam submissions over time and blocking recurring email domains

You're always going to receive some level of spam submissions, but I would also encourage you to investigate the source of them if you haven't already. Maybe you're seeing a bunch of spam come in on a particular page or from a specific asset. I had a client receive a ton of spam submissions because they had a spam bot email address in their database that forwarded their email to a bunch of other bots that filled out the form. Make sure you have clean lists in place!

If it gets to this point, you can also potentially look at using non-HubSpot forms. As long as you have them connected to HubSpot somehow (either as non-HubSpot forms or through the forms API/an integration platform (i.e., Zapier), you should be able to use whatever forms and add-ons you want. Just keep in mind that you'd lose original source data for any leads created there since Hubspot would mark them as "Offline source" from an integration. Just wanted to throw this out there to let you know it's an option!

Hope this helps!!

[danmoyle]

Great advice and resources from @jolle here. +1 for all this ☝️