How it works
The Visforms spam protection plugin prevents spam bots from successfully submitting forms on your website.
Online blacklist provider
The Visforms spam protection plugin sends immediate requests to configurable online blacklist providers according to the plugin parameters.
These online blacklist providers maintain large online spam bot databases with spammer emails and spammer IPs that they have actively found or reported by those affected.
If an email address or IP address of the form sender is listed as a spam bot, the form cannot be submitted.
Note: The Visforms spam protection plugin does not contain or maintain its own spam bot databases.
Your individual whitelists and blacklists
The Visforms spam protection plugin has the option of maintaining four individual lists with your own entries.
With these individual whitelists and blacklists, you can also configure explicit access or explicit exclusion of email addresses or IP addresses:
- Email whitelist,
- Email blacklist,
- IP whitelist,
- IP blacklist.
Note: After appropriate activation in the form configuration, regular expressions can also be used in all 4 individual lists.
Online spambot databases
In the fight against spam and spammers, various online spambot databases have been established on the Internet. These services from the so-called blacklist providers can be used free of charge to operate effective spam protection on your own website. These special web applications actively and continuously search for spammer IPs and spammer email addresses. In some cases, they also accept suspected cases from those affected and check them for spam behavior. The results are stored in publicly accessible databases.
Spammer IPs and email addresses change frequently and constantly. That is why there is no one database in which all active spammers are listed. That is in the nature of things and if there were such a database, there would no longer be a spam problem.
Only hours to find and list
The online spambot databases are extremely effective in practice. New spammer IPs and spammer email addresses are usually found within a few hours and listed immediately. Therefore, using the databases offers a very high level of protection. Using several of these databases is exactly what our Visforms spam protection plugin does.
Sometimes spammers manage to find a completely new method to spread their spam. It can then happen that the spammers get past the online spambot databases for several days. In this case, you can simply temporarily add a captcha to the form. Adding a captcha is only a small configuration change with Visforms.