Virtue contact form is unable to filter out spam

[Minhajul]

Minhajul

May 5, 2019 at 12:00 am

Hi Ben,

I’m overwhelmed by the number of spam emails getting into my spam folder through Virtue Contact Form. I’m worried if it harms the reputation of my domain. Because some spammers are using the emails of my domain to send their spam messages.

For example, I often see emails coming from [email protected] to [email protected] with lots of spam words and links in the email messages.

I don’t know whether a domain can be harmed by sending spam content to its own email addresses. Could you please make your contact form a little smarter?

Because the simple math doesn’t seem to be working very well. Please don’t suggest another plugin to handle this. I’m sick of WordPress Plugins. They also break the style of my theme. Like JetPack always seems to break the style of the Post Comment button on my blog posts. I avoid Plugins whenever possible if something can be solved by adding or modifying some code.

One more thing I also like to mention that I do not use your Kadence ReCaptcha. For I already have Invisible ReCaptcha installed in my WordPress site. It provides a function for custom forms which I then added to Virtue Contact From before the closing </form> tag as it was instructed by the Plugin Author. The Invisible ReCaptcha loads and stays at the bottom-left of my site when I visit my contact page. But I don’t think it does any good like the simple math.

Here are some of the things you may want to pay attention to.

1. Please change the Name field and split it into First Name and Last Name in the same row. Auto-capitalization of the initial letters of these fields will be much appreciated to get clean records.

2. The email field must not validate emails when anybody/spammers are putting an email address of the domain rather than using their own email. For example, Email field of the site *Login to see link should not allow anybody to use [email protected] as their form address. Employees don’t use visitor’s contact form/lead generation form to communicate with their team members. I don’t think it would be an issue for the people having their work email addresses on that domain.

3. Please add a Subject field to your Virtue theme’s contact form. It makes the sender’s purpose clear and helps the recipient prioritize tasks without reading the whole message. As a matter of fact, I don’t understand why this is missing in the first place. It wasn’t something I expected from an intelligent team like yours who have gone ahead and created fine things that other developers usually miss or overlook. Indeed, you have good taste.

4. Do not validate an email when the message field contains links in it. Give the visitor an error message that links are not allowed in the message.

5. Could you implement an Anti-spam Honeypot in your Virtue Contact Form? I don’t know whether it really helps. A lot of techies are talking about it. It’s funny that spam bots are trapped in a hidden field where they are able to work their way around the Simple Math or ReCaptcha.

​As always I’m grateful for your generous support.​ I also think it is necessary to inform you about these problems we existing users are facing. So you can make it better and attract more people to your business who pay attention to these details.

Thank you again for your continuous support!

—
Regards,
Minhajul Haque