Not preventing any spam on Formidable email subscription forms

[Jennifer Mattern]

Hi. I’m having issues with WPArmour and Formidable Forms. The site in question is https://AllFreelanceWriting.com.

For longer forms (like job board or directory profile submissions), the plugin seems to do a fine job. But I also use Formidable for email sign-up forms tied to my Campaign Monitor account. And on those forms, it’s doing nothing to prevent a flood of spam submissions (which messes not only with CM billing, but with email open rates, click-throughs, etc. for what’s otherwise been a very clean list).

There are problems using Recaptcha with these forms, as going strict enough to stop actual spammers is causing the forms to fail for real users too, and lowering that Recaptcha threshold at all opens the spam floodgates again.

So I removed recaptcha and upgraded to WPArmour extended since it’s promoted as not needing Recaptcha alongside it. My hope was the two-level spam check in the premium version might fix this. But it hasn’t.

It seems there’s no spam being stopped when the input fields are an email address, drop-down, and checkbox, and that the plugin is only able to stop spammers on forms that require larger amounts of text input. Is that right? Or is there a setting I’m missing somewhere to address this? It’s great that it can stop the usual spam on larger forms. But the subscription forms are by far the most important, and I can’t seem to get it to prevent these fake sign-ups without an overly-strict Recaptcha costing the site subscribers as well.

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!

• This topic was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Jennifer Mattern.

[Jocelyn]

Yes, I am having the same problem on http://www.HurrySlowly.co but with the Mailchimp for WordPress email signup plugin. Wp Armour Extended seems to do absolutely nothing to stop spammers since I have implemented it a few weeks ago. I have a similar setup where the form is just an email signup field and a submit button. WP Armour Extended is enabled but seems to have no effect. And when I test it by clicking “act as a spambot” nothing happens. It still collects the email like normal. I would welcome any thoughts as well!

[Dinesh]

Hi,

Can you please send me the url where can i check those forms ?

Thanks

[Jennifer Mattern]

I already did in my original post. One of them is right at the top of the homepage. The same form is also elsewhere on the site (subscribe page, jobs page, and I believe on post pages). Thanks!

[Jocelyn]

I would prefer to not post the URL here because I’m getting so much spam! But if you go to /newsletter at the URL i already posted above, you will find it.
I actually had another form in the sidebar of that page but I’ve had to take it down because the spam was just unbelievably bad. The spambots are still getting through this form despite WP Armour and Double opt-in. I don’t know what to do!

[Author]

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