Contact form is an annoyance every website owner has to deal with. Spambots will target you regardless of how big or small your site is, flooding your inbox with useless messages. Lucky for you, we know of an API that could serve you of good help! Keep reading below.
Contact form spam occurs when malicious entities or back actors submit unwanted information through online forms in order to phish or send abusive messages. In simpler terms, form spam is when unwanted messages make their way through your website’s forms (and sometimes onto the frontend of your site) – oftentimes without you even noticing.
Contact form spam is usually automated by bots. As a result, even small WordPress blogs and websites are frequently targets of contact form spam. These spambots crawl websites looking for non-secure forms in order to send you spammy links.
Spambots are computer programs that are designed to submit false information to your contact form or email signup form. They look for ways to gain access to your website, server, or email address in order to send spam emails. Worse, they may steal your email list, giving them a fresh batch of people to spam.
You can drastically reduce the risks of such malicious activities by using a secure WordPress hosting platform. However, by implementing additional safeguards like an anti-spam filter API, you can significantly reduce the risk of contact form spam.
Why Is There Contact Form Spam?
You may be thinking that form spam should not be an issue these days. After all, traditional email spam is mostly under control thanks to sophisticated spam filters that block spam messages.
But web forms aren’t quite there yet, and spam in the form of junk messages and irrelevant links continues to plague them. Furthermore, form spam persists because it is effective.
For example, spammers look for vulnerabilities in your site’s forms so they can hijack and use them to relay email spam to others. These emails appear in people’s inboxes as if they were sent by you. Then, unknowingly, people open and even click through to what they think is your website, only to find themselves on a completely different site. The spammer is now reaping the benefits as a result of increased site traffic and engagement.
Moreover, spammers seek to exploit any web forms on your website that may allow them to publish their messages, complete with hyperlinks to other websites and products, in order to gain link equity and improve their SEO.
If you want to combat form spam, you’re going to need to do everything in your power to block the automated bots from your forms. But at the same time, you’ll have to find the balance and make your website’s forms as easy as possible for real website visitors to fill out.
And there is where we present to you the best solution: Spam Detection API.
Why Spam Detection API?
This Spam Detection API will receive the text from which you want to check the content as well as, if available, the sender’s IP address. The response will indicate how many words were flagged as spam, allowing you to double-check them. Furthermore, if the sender’s IP address is provided, the tool will verify that it is not blacklisted. From now on, you will be notified if the sender is a spammer.
Spam Detection API protects your website from spam comments and contact form submissions by working independently of your forms. This API compares submissions to word, name, and email address blacklists.
For your contact forms on your site/application, you can surely block the spam ones with ease. Start using Spam Detection API now!