About this plugin
Classic Honeypot for CF7 adds a [honeypot] form tag to Contact Form 7 (CF7) that stops spam bots without a CAPTCHA.
The principle of a honeypot is simple: bots are stupid. While some spam is hand-delivered, the vast majority is submitted by bots that blindly fill in every field they find. The honeypot adds an extra field that is hidden from people; if it gets filled in, the submission is flagged as spam.
The plugin also includes an optional submission time check: if a form is submitted faster than a configurable number of seconds, it is treated as spam, since bots usually submit forms in one or two seconds while people take much longer.
Features
- A [honeypot] form tag, with its own button in the Contact Form 7 form editor.
- An optional submission time check.
- Global settings for the placeholder, the accessibility message, the autocomplete value and how the field is hidden, which each form tag can override.
- Blocked submissions are recorded in the Contact Form 7 spam log, with the reason.
- Works with Flamingo to review blocked submissions.
About this fork
Classic Honeypot for CF7 is a fork of Honeypot for Contact Form 7, written by Nocean and contributors and released under the GPLv2 or later. 1 and has been developed independently since then, in parallel with the original plugin.
1, the honeypot field and the time check, and maintains it for current versions of WordPress, PHP and Contact Form 7.
All credit for the original idea and code goes to Nocean and the contributors of Honeypot for Contact Form 7. Any bugs in this fork are ours, not theirs.
Classic Honeypot for CF7 is not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors of Honeypot for Contact Form 7 or Contact Form 7.
Switching from Honeypot for Contact Form 7
Classic Honeypot for CF7 can replace Honeypot for Contact Form 7 without changes to your forms:
- It uses the same [honeypot] form tag and the same tag options, so your existing forms keep working.
- It uses the same public filters (see below), so your customizations keep working too.
- The first time it runs, it imports the settings of Honeypot for Contact Form 7.
The two plugins cannot run at the same time, because they register the same form tag. Deactivate Honeypot for Contact Form 7 before activating this plugin. While it is active, Classic Honeypot for CF7 stays inactive and shows a notice.
Recommended plugins
We recommend Flamingo together with CF7 and this plugin. Flamingo stores spam submissions in its Inbound Messages / Spam section, showing you what got caught in the honeypot and why. Enable “Store Honeypot Value” in the settings to see what the bots left behind.
Privacy
This plugin does not track users, store any user data, send data to external servers, or use cookies. It is an add-on for Contact Form 7; please review Contact Form 7’s privacy policy for more information.