Constant Stream of Spam from Netlify Form Submissions

Hi Netlify,

I have a site on your platform, that has been recently released to get leads on my marketing contact form, however I am receiving tons of Russian bot spam even though I have setup precautions to prevent against this completely.

Almost everyday to even a week I am constantly swamped with this and I end up continuously removing spam from my forms, wasting my time, even worse there isn’t even a delete all spam button!

I am unsure If I want to pay for a service to add additional form data if I get tons of spam in return.

Thanks.

Hi @pateljoel

What precautions have you taken?
Have you enabled the honeypot or reCAPTCHA on your Netlify form?

I’ve enabled the honeypot on my site, but spam keeps coming in, my users complain about reCAPTCHAs a lot so I don’t have that enabled.

Hey there @pateljoel Welcome to Netlify forums!

Unfortunately I can imagine implementing such feature would prove difficult since filtering spam from genuine submissions is a complex task that has a big error margin.

To cover the issue at hand, Bots these days are advanced enough to bypass many honeypot methods. The only other reasonable solution would be using a CAPTCHA.

Mind me asking why your visitors don’t like using CAPTCHA. There are plenty of alternatives to Google’s reCAPTCHA.

Kyle.

2 Likes

Please see the image below on where this feature should be placed, I painstakingly deleted all spam submissions but the selection UI is similar to the verified submissions.

I can see there is a ‘Expand All’ button there, I assume the same can be done for delete all spam in the ‘Spam Submissions’ section.

I don’t think there is a need for classification or filtering here, if it is already filtered to a ‘Spam Submissions’ section as Netlify has already done.

The issue is that I currently have to delete tons of spam one by one and by going to the next page which is far too time consuming.

It would be better just to have a button to delete all spam or select all spam then delete them.

3 Likes

You can request a feature on the forums however like I explained its probably a risky concept to implement. Users could easily delete “spam” and it actually be a genuine submission that was misfiltered by Netlify.

However your idea for a quick select option to choose which submissions to delete is a good idea.

At the time being we have a select option to differ from verified and un-verified submissions and I think that’s as far as things will go on that side.

Going back to the current issue, is there a specific reason you do not want to use CAPTCHA?

Kyle.

1 Like

I refuse to use Google CAPTCHA to support their reach across the web for my website or use any Captcha system since my users are already annoyed by it.

I removed it with the thought that the honeypot system by Netlify would resolve the spam issue without having to resort to Google, it is classifying it well enough for me.

I’ve just woken up to see more spam again that I have to manually delete, so I would argue this would save us a lot of time to have a ‘delete all spam’ or ‘select all’ then delete.

Please see attached on how ‘delete all spam’ and ‘select all then delete’ would look like in Netlify.

Delete All Spam

Select All then Delete Submissions

The honeypot is doing exactly what it is intended to: capture spam.

Suggest heading to Features and submitting a request for this (link to this thread) and the feature may become reality.

There is also a feature request Support for hCaptcha in Netlify Forms as an alternative method to reCAPTCHA. You might wish to add your voice there too give your strong stance against reCAPTCHA.