Spam Protection

Multi-Layered Spam Defense

Spam degrades data quality, fills your inbox with noise, and exhausts third-party CRM quotas. FormBold delivers four complementary layers of spam defense that you can combine for optimal protection.

1. FormBold Basic Spam Filter

FormBold's built-in heuristic filter operates entirely on the server side without adding any friction or CAPTCHA challenges to your visitors:

• Analyzes submission velocity, known spam IPs, and disposable email domain lists.
• Scans message content for common phishing patterns, malicious links, and suspicious payload structures.
• Flagged submissions are automatically tagged as 'Spam' in your Submissions table and silenced from triggering notification emails.

To enable: Open your Form Settings > navigate to the Spam Protection card > toggle ON 'Basic Spam Filter'.

2. Honeypot Spam Defense

A honeypot is an invisible trap field added to your HTML form. Human visitors will never see or fill it, but automated spam bots blindly fill every input they encounter:

<!-- Hidden Honeypot Field -->
<div style="display: none;" aria-hidden="true">
  <input type="text" name="_gotcha" tabindex="-1" autocomplete="off" />
</div>

If the honeypot input contains any value upon arrival, FormBold instantly flags the submission as automated bot activity and discards it.

3. Automatic Cloud reCAPTCHA

FormBold provides a zero-configuration automatic reCAPTCHA check. When enabled, FormBold presents a cloud verification step when high-risk submission signatures are detected. This requires no API keys or frontend code changes, but is designed primarily for standard HTML POST form actions.

4. Custom Google reCAPTCHA (v2 / v3)

For full control and seamless support for both standard POST forms and AJAX/Fetch applications, configure your own Google reCAPTCHA keys:

Step-by-step setup:

1. Visit the Google reCAPTCHA Admin Console (https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin).
2. Register a new site, choose 'reCAPTCHA v2' ('I'm not a robot' Checkbox), and add your website domain(s).
3. Copy the generated Site Key and Secret Key.
4. In your FormBold Dashboard, go to Form Settings > Spam Protection > enable 'Custom reCAPTCHA'.
5. Paste your Secret Key and Site Key into the settings fields and click Save.
6. Add the Google reCAPTCHA script and verification widget to your HTML form.

Complete reCAPTCHA Implementation Example:

<!-- 1. Load Google reCAPTCHA API script -->
<script src="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js" async defer></script>

<form action="https://formbold.com/s/YOUR_FORM_ID" method="POST">
  <label for="email">Email:</label>
  <input type="email" name="email" id="email" required />

  <label for="message">Message:</label>
  <textarea name="message" id="message" required></textarea>

  <!-- 2. Embed the reCAPTCHA widget before the submit button -->
  <div class="g-recaptcha" data-sitekey="YOUR_RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY"></div>

  <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

Tip: Custom reCAPTCHA works seamlessly across both traditional HTML form submissions and asynchronous JavaScript fetch() calls.