How to avoid spam in JetPack’s contact forms

If you use the JetPack plugin’s contact forms module you will be more than tired of receiving spam messages, am I wrong? Well, let’s solve it.

It’s inevitable that from the moment your website starts appearing in search engines there will be lots of professional spammers who will try to get their messages into any form they find, whether it’s a comment form, a contact form or any other kind of form.

But unfortunately, unlike other contact form plugins, JetPack’s contact form module does not include any kind of spam protection.

Ah, but it can be solved! Let’s get to it.

Control spam with Akismet

Yes, the Akismet spam control plugin not only acts on WordPress contact forms, it also integrates with JetPack contact forms, and acts the same as with comments, detecting and marking as spam those messages that its engine detects as suspicious.

In its settings, you can choose whether to send them directly to the spam folder or keep them for your manual review, which I advise you to do, since I’ve found unpleasant surprises sometimes, since a user marked as spam on another WordPress.com blog can be systematically sent as spam anywhere with Akismet.

It has some downsides but it works.

Recaptcha Jetpack

Another possibility is to use the reCAPTCHA Jetpack plugin.

Once installed, in its settings you can choose the type of reCAPTCHA to use, the traditional check or the invisible one, also known as reCAPTCHA v3 or honeypot, because normal users do not see it, but spammers go like flies to honey.

The reCAPTCHA keys you can simply get them from the Google reCAPTCHA website and put them there, save changes and it works.

The truth is that it works wonderfully, even though it has been more than 3 years since it was updated.

WPBRUISER{no-captcha anti-spam}

With this curious name we present a plugin that previously offered its reCAPTCHA functionality for JetPack as a separate paid module, but that is currently available with this completely free plugin.

It is actually a security plugin, but among its many features it has an anti-spam security module in contact forms, from which you can apply protection against spammers in JetPack’s contact forms.

This plugin does not use any CAPTCHA system but uses server-side bots and spammers detection rules, adding protection headers to your site.

Server side

The other way to try to avoid spam comments is by adding a rule to the Apache server’s .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*tublog.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Since JetPack’s contact forms use the standard WordPress comment hooks it can work, just like Akismet does to integrate with the contact forms.

And that’s it, I haven’t found any other method to avoid spam in JetPack’s contact forms. If you know of any more, please let me know.