I've got a small form on my wordpress site that's in HTML and placed in as a text widget. I get tons of spam mail from this. Any way I can keep this from spam? I've placed hidden fields but that doesn't work. ANY IDEAS????
You might add some form of captcha to stop automated attacks, but just about anything you do will not prevent human spamming. In the end the only real solution is to capture the IP address and deny aceess for the IP in your .htaccess. If you are actually exposing an email address with "mailto:" then you will be targeted no matter what. It is better to get the information on the client side and do any mailing necessary server side.
hence the problem of our form. it is exposing an email address with a mailto: …i may have to use a different form. thanks!
Yeah there are email harvester bots that crawl the web looking for exposed email addresses and the slimy operators of those bots then sell the gathered information to clients paying to flood the world with spam; and to other spam operators. There is is enough money in the scummy world of spam to guarantee that they will keep doing it as long as they can find clients.
Usually the hidden fields (honeypot) along with a good captcha will get a majority of it. While you will never filter out the humans submitting your forms as mentioned previously but it is usually always and automated script. Some captchas are easy for the automated scripts to bypass so make sure it is a good one. Gravity forms is expensive but I use it a lot and the captcha along with honeypot usually works very well. Dang spammers cause me a lot of headaches
I don’t know why your are using HTML form and why you are doing so much coding for simple form, Why you are not using any plugin like contact 7 or any other, In that plugins you will get the functionality of captcha which will stop spamming and you can store data of the filled form also..