Genuine form submissions getting flagged as spam

It’s a personal dashboard web app, not Corona related in any way. I use the web app to track habits, workouts etc. I use the forms to input data to a google sheet via zapier. It’s been running for 6 months without trouble. Only had trouble the last 1-2 weeks. As of know I have to login to Netlify each time I log something in the dashbord web app to verify the submission. Deactivating spam would be nice as I am the only one having access, but if there is no ETA for this an alternative solution while waiting for that functionality would be nice.

hmm, that is indeed frustrating.

We have an open feature request I can add your voice to re: being able to switch off akismet completely, but, i have no ETA for that as it is not an issue for folks most of the time.

If i were you, your best option is to log in regularly and make sure you mark the non-spam stuff as such, hopefully that helps train akismet to not mark legit things as spam. Sorry I don’t have better news for you at this time!

If akismet is marking my submissions as spam now after 6 months without any trouble (and now every submission) the spam filter is clearly not working. This issue must be affecting more users than have raised their voices. A wild guess is that a lot of users is missing messages due to them being placed in spam.

Logging in to Netlify and mark submissions is sadly no solution. Been doing this for 1-2 weeks without any improvement and the spam filter as of now just dont make sense. Akismet must have done some changes lately that is affecting users.

Hey xcvb, i totally empathize with your situation - i bet it is frustrating to have non-spam messages be landing in your spam filter. Do you have a count for us on how many times this has happened? Do you have more information on when this started, exactly? I am not sure who to talk to about this, but i will see what i can do, and having as many specifics as possible as to when/how this problem started showing up might be helpful. thanks.

Thanks Perry. It’s frustrating, but at the same a re-write of my App is in place. I use Netlify forms and Zapier to post data to a Google sheet, I also collect data from the same sheet via Sheets API. So I can just drop Netlify forms/Zapier and post the data directly via the Sheets API. No need to investigate further. Also thinking about It my submissions must be a bit weird, almost always from the same IP and somewhat repetetive. It was just strange that It have worked for 6 months and now lately started marking submissions as spam. Thanks for providing a great service and having a free plan for us hobbyist and also taking the time to answer in the forums. And to the thread starter, sorry for hi-jacking your post.

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I am also having an issue, thought it was because I’d added ReCaptcha to the form, spent ages debugging until I eventually removed all changes and went back to the original form only to find I was getting the same issue.

Every form entry ends up in the spam section, also had somebody else try which did the same.

hey wezlar, sorry to hear you are having a bit of a rough go with spam protection.

Unfortunately, the akismet part of our forms is something we have very little (as in none, really) control over - we literally buy the akismet platform, integrated it into our form handling, and they do the rest. And akismet itself is quite a behemoth, as it is based on wordpress spam “trends”. Kind of like how we can’t bend the google algorithm to our will - its sort of the same with akismet. Not the answer you wanted to hear, I’m sure, and I’m sorry I don’t have better news.

All I can suggest is to keep marking the valid submissions as not spam to help train the algo, and if there are any developments, we can definitely let you know.

Is there any update on this issue? I’m experiencing the same issue.

In my case, it’s a Resort website. This website is for a client who will prefer to not manually verifying every form submission.

hi @omargee, we havent made any changes to how are forms interact with our spam protection (akismet) since July I’m afraid. The only advice is the same as I can give above! sorry i don’t have better news for you :frowning:

Hey Perry,

I’ve also just started running into this issue on a website with an editable textarea. The form is for inquiries and has a default message inside the textarea which the user can either leave as is, or edit to include their own text.

I know that above you’ve said essentially the Akismet service is essentially a black box, but I was wondering if you think these submissions are being flagged as spam because lots of users are submitting the form with the default message? And if so, do you have any advice on how to get around this?

Thanks!

hi @kieranstartup, we’ve thought about this a bit, and we don’t have a really great solution for you apart from leaving the field blank so it doesn’t offend akismet?

Another suggestion i am suddenly thinking of - could you write some custom code to strip out the default text if it hasn’t been changed so it doesn’t get submitted? that way you could still leave it in.

I’m also running into this problem.

I understand that there’s no control over Akismet in terms of deciding whether a message is spam or not, but perhaps there could be an option of still triggering webhooks and/or email hooks even if a submission is categorised as spam?

I’d rather get one or two spam messages come through via email than miss potentially valuable messages in my inbox.

Thank you!

hi @hitchcott, thanks for that suggestion - i can see how that would be useful. this isn’t an option at this time, but we are actively looking into improving how spam is handled and will report back here once we have something to share.

+1 for being able to disable Akismet. It seems to be random in my case, out of every 10 genuine messages 3 or 4 just get flagged as spam

2 Likes

Hi. there :slightly_smiling_face: Any updates on this ?

I’m working on a site that requires the Akismet spam filter to be disabled so that no submissions ever go to spam the main reason for this is that my client want’s to be notified with an email notification even if there is a spam submission which is not possible to do yet notifications only work for the verified submissions.

Hi @nisarhassan12,

Unfortunately, there’s still no changes in this regard. But maybe you could use a serverless function to send an email on every submission. For example:

form.addEventListener('submit', event => {
  event.preventDefault()
  // fetch to submit the form to Netlify forms
  fetch('/').then(() => {
    // trigger a function to send yourself an email
    fetch('.netlify/functions/sendMail')
  })
})

So with this, if you get 2 emails, 1 from your function and 1 from Netlify about form submission, you can be sure it’s a verified submission. If you get only the one from your function, you’d know there’s a spam submission.

Hi, I’m wondering if there’s any further updates on this, as like the others here, we’re also running into valid form submissions being flagged as spam. In our case we’re guessing it’s because the user might submit multiple forms in a short amount of time via ajax. But even so this is a valid use case for our site.

To make matters worse, there doesn’t seem to be a way to retrieve posts marked as “spam” via the API. We’re using the forms API to display recent form submissions on an internal panel, but it excludes those marked as spam and there doesn’t seem to be a way to get them, via an optional parameter or otherwise. However i might also be missing something; could you confirm this is the case? And also provide any updates? Thanks!

You can use ?state=spam:

https://api.netlify.com/api/v1/sites/<site-id>/submissions?state=spam
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Is there really still no way to manage Akismet!?

My automated end-to-end tests (using playwright) are failing as my test form is getting marked as spam so the test timeout. I went to disable the spam checking while we develop but there appears to be no way to do so.

Reading other people problems it seem the netlify forms are basically unusable without any way to manage the spam filtering. Plus we don’t want to use Netlify’s form management console at all. That’s a shame as I wanted to take advantage of the spam filtering and HTML form encoding to JSON conversion.

Looks like, as someone else pointed out in another post I made, I will have to submit directly to a function and ignore the forms feature!

Hi there, @slim

Unfortunately, I don’t have an update for you at this time. That being said, I have shared your feedback with the Product team. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have additional thoughts on that matter.

-Hillary