Akismet in onBeforeFormSubmit to Further Reduce Spam Entries?

[navroop]

While continuing with a migration off of Contact Forms, Gravity Forms, etc to a purely Hubspot forms (embedded, popup, CTA, etc) based approach, we ran an interesting set of tests.

We have a Contact Form 7 form that we know routinely received spam entries. Turns out Akismet was not properly integrated for that particular form, despite being turned on for all others. (Lab environment, so not a big deal...)

So here's what we did:

1. Collected known Spam entries from last 24 hrs from that form without Akismet.
2. Submitted them again ourselves to that form without modification -- all got through, as expected.
3. Configured Akismet on each of that Contact Form 7 form's fields and re-Submitted the known Spam entries -- none got through, as expected -- this is great!
4. Ran those same known Spam entries through our embedded Hubspot Contact Us Form and popup Hubspot Forms -- all got through and resulted in new contact creation, which was not expected -- this is bad!

A few screenshots are below.

Contact Form 7 w/ Akismet Integration blocking Spam Entry prior to submission.

Proof the same Spam Entry went all through on Hubspot Form Submission.

This leads me to believe an Akismet integration for Hubspot would be valuable. But, there is none natively.

The Forms API / Javascript response to another question I asked yesterday got me thinking:

• For embedded forms, can the onBeforeFormSubmit() event be modified to make call to Akismet API to check the Name and Email Fields prior to allowing form submission?
• We have Akismet plugin installed on our Wordpress site.
• For Contact Form 7, we turned on the integration then added akismet:author to the form field definition. So super easy. I know a Hubspot integration won't be nearly as simple...

Regardless, if this is possible, it would only apply for embedded Forms. Not sure if there is an equivalent path to even try for Pop Forms / CTA (beta) popups. Is there one?

Has Hubspot considered an Akismet integration for those of us who pay for both? Integrations with things like Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, etc and Hubspot seem less useful (but do reduce the need to redevelop things), but better anti-spam integrations would add a lot of net new value.

[TMarc8]

I was having the same challenge with this and decided to try formwatch.ai instead. Cheaper and totally solved my spam issues 

[navroop · Accepted solution]

Support has provided this link https://clearout.io/integrations/hubspot-forms-clearout/ to something that might help. That said, never heard of it before, and haven't seen its efficacy in action, whereas with Akismet, all well known.

The approach shown though makes me wonder if this shouldn't be possible writing against the Akismet API...

Anyone does this already?