Additional spam protection options
Anti-spam honeypot, Visforms spam protection plugin and captchas are far-reaching and effective in protecting forms from spammers as far as possible.
There are also other ways to intensify protection.
The following examples show how spam protection can be further improved individually with little additional configuration effort.
Other options with Visforms
Using custom validation
This is particularly easy if you have a mandatory field “First and last name”. You can set a custom validation there. This checks and ensures that the text entered contains a space.
This requirement does not affect the use of the form by real users at all. At the same time, in our experience, spam bots absolutely fail at this simple hurdle.
The regular expression for this validation is: ^\S+\s+.*\S$.
You can round off the feature with a suitable user-defined error message: Please enter your first and last name.
Protection options for the web server
In some cases it may be possible to set up effective spam protection before the actual pages of a Joomla instance are called up. These procedures are of course outside the scope of Joomla or Visforms.
For experienced users and developers, this includes using htaccess files with Apache and others.
Bot management service provider
Note: With this method, real users do not have to deal with captchas when filling out forms.
Bot management regulates bot access to a website or online application. This also includes spam bots that fill out and submit forms.
A particularly effective approach is to look for a large number of telltale bot warning signs on a large number of websites and to react to each one. In this way, a bot management service provider collects analyzable data from all of the websites it manages. Based on this data from all of the websites it manages, targeted measures, pattern recognition, predictive analyses and other complementary strategies can then be used.
Note: Modern bot management uses machine learning, behavior analysis and fingerprinting to classify website usage and filter out bots.
One well-known and widely used bot management service provider is Cloudflare.