Over the last two weeks we began to see reports from a number of our clients that they were experiencing a spike in spam submissions on their contact forms. In all cases the Gravity Forms plugin was being used and the option for the built-in unobtrusive “honeypot” anti-spam measure was enabled. Normally, if the honeypot approach is not enough, we recommend enabling the built-in support for reCAPTCHA; in these cases, however, this approach was not desirable for a number of reasons.

Having read about the success of David Walsh‘s recently published anti-spam technique, and inspired by Ben Marshall‘s recently published WordPress Zero Spam plugin (which applies David’s technique to WordPress comments and registrations) we decided to create a plugin that would add similar functionality to Gravity Forms.

We built a working prototype and rolled it out to a number of clients for testing. These sites were receiving spam submissions in the range of 2 to 7 per day. As of this morning, nearly a full week after installing this plugin, they have received exactly zero. That’s not to say that this method is perfect, because it is not – we’re already planning improvements – but it is certainly encouraging, to say the least.

You can read more about the plugin here: Gravity Forms Zero Spam