GravityView is now the proud maintainer of the Gravity Forms Zero Spam plugin! It’s a solid, simple plugin that does one thing very well: prevents Gravity Forms form spam.
We Were Getting a Lot of Contact Form Spam.
Form spam is a pain. Our public contact form was getting so many spam submissions that it was driving us bananas.
We Tried a Lot of Options, but Only a Paid Service Worked.
We enabled Gravity Forms’ honeypot field, but the anti-spam honeypot field wasn’t working!
We enabled Gravity Forms’ Google reCAPTCHA integration, but that didn’t work.
We restricted bot traffic using our CDN, Cloudflare. That didn’t work.
We signed up for Akismet, and Akismet did finally work. But Akismet costs some money and we realized that:
- Not everyone can afford a spam filtering service, and
- You shouldn’t need to pay for one!
So How Do You Prevent Form Spam Without a CAPTCHA?
After we stopped the influx of annoying bot submissions with Akismet, we wondered whether there was a plugin for reducing Gravity Forms form spam that didn’t require a service and was free.
In addition, we had the following criteria:
- Stop the spam without a CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs require users to perform difficult tasks in order to prove they’re not a bot. That burden should not be the user’s!
- Don’t require users to solve math calculations. This is also user-hostile, and not everyone is good at math.
- Remove spam with minimal configuration or fuss.
After searching, we discovered Gravity Forms Zero Spam.
Zero Spam is originally based on David Walsh’s WordPress Comment Spam code. It is simple and elegant. It was developed in 2014 by our friends at GoWP. We saw opportunities to improve the plugin and asked if we could take over the maintenance.
What’s Next For This Gravity Forms Spam Blocker?
We’re proud to keep improving and maintaining the plugin for free on WordPress.org. It’s an honor to be helping people who use Gravity Forms block spam.
To learn more about Gravity Forms read How to Use Gravity Forms: The Ultimate Guide.