I have a similar issue as a previous topic by the name “Help! The BOTs are taking over!”
In my situation the simple Contact Us form is getting a multitude of entries with the following similar characteristics. The First Name and Last Name fields are similar except the Last Name fleld always has two capitalized letters appended to the last name.
Example:
First Name, JoeBlow
Last Name, Joe BlowSU
How could I compose a filter to accommodate this? Filtering by IP won’t work for me because the IP’s are all over the place.
Hi @cnymike - you could use the gform_field_validation filter for that. I think one approach would be to compare first name field to last name field, to see if that name is the same as first, (that would prevent JoeBlow JoeBlow) OR see if the last name field substr dropping the last 2 characters matches the first name.
If the name field in the form is field 1, then 1.3 is the first name, and 1.6 is the ID for the last name. Take a look at example 4 here for validating parts of a Name field:
You would need to come up with the PHP to say “IF first and last name are the same OR if all but the last 2 characters of the last name match the first name THEN fail validation.”
Yes. I’ve also used the honeypot which has not been very helpful at all. I also added a simply 4+2= field which also hasn’t helped since I do believe it is human interaction causing the spam , not a bot.