Introduction

Spam submissions are one of the biggest issues with Gravity Forms in WordPress. You can enable CAPTCHA, honeypot, and Akismet, and still receive multiple spam submissions every week. The spam submissions usually contain specific terms like ‘ seo, content writer, marketing,’ etc, which may not have anything to do with your service or products you offer on your website.

This is why we came up with the anti-spam mechanism to block specific keywords for your Gravity Forms. You can block the form submissions if it contains a certain message and show an error message, or better, let the submission go through but mark it spam.

Why I Built This Anti-Spam Feature

After managing multiple forms for a client, I noticed that most of the spam submissions for a pattern, and by just blocking those specific keywords, I was able to reduce the spam submissions by up to 90 percent and over time as you keep adding the keywords to your list, you rarely get spam submissions.

Features of the Keyword Blocking Anti Spam Solution

• Block keywords or phrases
• Works per form
• Case-insensitive matching
• Choose between “Mark as Spam” or “Block Submission.”
• Custom error message
• Lightweight and non-intrusive

How it Works

The keyword blocking anti-spam feature is part of the free Booster for Gravity Forms plugin. Once you have installed and activated the plugin then follow the steps shown below.

• Open your website backend and navigate to Forms -> Booster.
• Select the form for which you want to block specific keywords.
• Now navigate to the ‘Anti-Spam’ panel and then the Restrictions section.
• Here, enable the keyword filter. Once it is enabled then you will get the following option
  • Keywords: Keywords which should be blocked. Add one keyword per line.
  • Action to Perform: You can either mark the entry as spam or restrict form submission. If you restrict the submission, then you will also get the option to set the error message that should be shown. In either case, no notifications will be sent for the form.

Example Use Case

Let’s say you’re getting form submissions like

“We offer cheap SEO services, 100% guaranteed results. Reply to this email for more details!”

To stop this submission, you can recognize that by merely blocking the word ‘seo’, you can block this as well as a lot of other spam marketing emails.

If you want to be more specific, you can block ‘cheap seo services’.

If you are unsure that blocking something might block some genuine submissions, then it is recommended that you use ‘Mark as Spam’ under the ‘Actions to Perform’ setting. This way, you can manually review the form spam submissions every week or so and see if any genuine submissions got blocked and take corrective measures.

Future Enhancement Plans:

We are always looking to improve the plugin so that it can benefit you more and more. Below are some of the ideas we have in the roadmap. Let us know in the comments below which you think will be useful and we will implement it.

• Export/import keyword lists
• Global keyword list option (in addition to per-form)
• Block Spam Emails

Final Thoughts

Spamming bots have evolved, bypassing CAPTCHAs, Akismet, honeypots, etc. This plugin gives you something which you have full control over and outsmarts the bots.

If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below and let us know.