How to Protect Your Website Against Spam with Honeypots
A honeypot is a trap set to detect and capture potential intruders. In the world of website forms, honeypots are used to protect against spam. Site owners can use honeypots as an additional layer of security for their contact form or feedback boxes on their site. The term “honeypot” comes from the idea that these traps are sweet enough to attract all sorts of attention but sticky enough not to let any intruder escape without being caught!
What are honey pots
Honeypots are used to help site owners fight against spam. By filling out honeypot fields on forms, would-be spammers can be detected and filtered by email service providers or web hosting companies before they even have a chance to reach your inbox! If you’re looking for the best honeypots on offer, check out our honeypot quiz below:
The first step in protecting your website from spam is determining which honeypot plugin will work best with the form you want protected. Honeypots come in many shapes and sizes so it’s important that you install one that won’t conflict with other plugins or scripts running on your site.
Popular honeypot plugins and tools
There are plenty of plugins and tools to protect against spam. We’ll take a look at three of the most popular honeypot plugins.
1. Slapform honeypot
First and foremost, Slapform comes equipped with an amazing honeypot system right out of the box. You simply need to add a hidden input field to your HTML forms and set the name attribute to slap_honey. Behind the scenes, Slapform will analyze the submission for spam and, if the slap_honey field is filled out, it will return an error to the person trying to submit.
2. Honeypot by WPForms
We’ll start with one of the more well known honeypots: Honeypot by WPForms. With this tool, you can give your contact forms multiple layers of security against spamming robots and spammers! It starts out by analyzing data like IP addresses, location information, and request headers to determine if any bots are trying to submit requests through your website’s form. If it detects anything suspicious or unusual going on behind the scenes—it will instantly deny access from that user before they even have a chance to reach your inbox!
3. Akismet
Finally, we’ll look at Akismet. Akismet is a WordPress honeypot that detects spam and other malicious activity on your website. It works by catching the signals, or digital fingerprints of suspicious behavior happening in your site’s comment section as well as through contact forms to identify any potential spammers.
There are honeypots for different purposes—from protecting against email scams to preventing content from being copied illegally across domains. Honeypots have been used by some of the largest websites (e-commerce sites like Amazon) for years now and they are still just one more way we can protect our business!
Honeypots might seem daunting at first glance, but with these tips you’ll be able to get started using honeypots today!
Final thoughts
The honeypot is a weapon in the arsenal of many web developers. It’s not much to ask, and it will keep you ahead of any potential spammer who might be looking for an easy target.
It should go without saying that honeypots are powerful defensive tools when used correctly, but they can also provide valuable insight into your site traffic as well! For example: honeypot software could help identify suspicious behavior happening on your site such as failed login attempts or abandoned carts–information which may lead to more profound insights about both online fraud activity and customer shopping habits.
As with all security measures, honeypots take time and effort to maintain. Slapform takes this task off your hands by providing a honeypot system to all users.
The honeypots are designed to be unobtrusive and easy-to-use. Take a look at the name triggers documentation page to learn about how to take advantage of Slapform’s honeypot system.
Like what you're reading? Subscribe to our top stories.
We are continuously putting out relevant content. If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact us!
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
Ready to have kick-ass forms?
Get started now.