{"id":573,"date":"2015-05-25T22:08:36","date_gmt":"2015-05-25T10:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/geektactics.geektamin.com\/?p=573"},"modified":"2024-06-14T09:52:54","modified_gmt":"2024-06-13T21:52:54","slug":"how-to-filter-spammy-words-and-stop-notifications-sending-when-using-gravity-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geektactics.co.nz\/blog\/how-to-filter-spammy-words-and-stop-notifications-sending-when-using-gravity-forms\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Filter Spammy Words and Stop Notifications Sending When Using Gravity Forms"},"content":{"rendered":"
I was editing the contact form on one of my client’s sites today, and was horrified to see the amount of spammy messages coming through their Gravity Forms contact form.<\/p>\n
Emails like this:<\/p>\n
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Or if they’re more clever, they’ll send it from a European female name … as this generates a higher response rate!<\/p>\n
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Nearly all of this contact form spam is sent from temporary Gmail accounts that will soon be shut down when they get too many spam complaints.<\/p>\n
Yes, there is a CAPTCHA on the form, but these messages are submitted by real people, so they fill in the CAPTCHA. There is a strong theme to the messages – nearly all selling cheap SEO and outsourcing services.<\/p>\n
Since they have some very common keywords in the messages, such as “outsource”, “SEO” or “Dear Sir\/Madam”, I decided to apply a filter to the notifications, so that if the message has one of those spammy keywords in it, then the Gravity Forms notification won’t\u00a0send to my client.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately after a fair bit of time searching, I found that there was no Gravity Forms\u00a0plugin available to do what I was wanting.<\/p>\n