Whenever dealing with online forms, mitigating spam submissions is an ongoing challenge. We’ve identified several solutions that can be helpful in limiting the amount of spam you receive.

The best place to prevent spam is at the source – that is, the website. While it is possible to suppress/hide/remove spam submissions from systems like Act-On and the Insight Engine, the best solution is to prevent spam submissions from passing to those systems in the first place. If you are using WordPress/Gravity Forms, we’ve identified two systems that we recommend. Each has their own pros and cons. They can be used independently, or together for the most effective spam-blocking solution.

Akismet

Akismet is invisible to the site visitor, and uses aggregated data to detect patterns of spam submissions. Enabling Akismet will create a new ‘Spam’ folder in the entries list for each Gravity Form. These should be periodically monitored for false positives.

Google reCaptcha (v2 Invisible)

This is typically invisible to the visitor, but will occasionally show them the well-known ‘select boxes’ popup. There are no spam folders to modify with this system. It can be less effective than Akismet, however.

Other Recommendations

•  The Newfangled Email Blacklist is a plugin that requires business email domains to be used when Gravity Forms are submitted. If a blacklisted email domain (e.g., Gmail) is detected, the user will be prompted to enter a different email domain. Optionally, they can confirm the use of their blacklisted email address by checking a confirmation checkbox.
  
• The Newfangled Gravity Forms Helper plugin includes a setting that prevents forms from being submitted with the same value in the First Name and Last Name field. Many spam submissions will use the same value for both fields.