The Death Of The Contact Form
Hi
If you have a contact form on your website then you might well have noticed a huge increase in the number of spammy advertising messages received through it.
One of my sites has been getting so many of them that I have now removed the contact form from the site.
Anti-spam plugins have been no protection from it whatsoever.
Until today, I've been simply deleting the messages without reading the content - you can very quickly tell that it's not a genuine query. However today I read a message that confirmed my fears that spamming contact forms is becoming big business.
This is the message:
Name: Clarice Jeffreys
Email: jeffreys.clarice71 @ outlook.com
Message: Hi, I'm sending you this message via your contact form on your website at cakesbyjan .co .uk. By reading this message you're living proof that contact form advertising works! Do you want to blast your ad to millions of contact forms? Maybe you prefer a more targeted approach and only want to blast our ad out to websites in certain business categories? Pay just $99 to blast your ad to 1 million contact forms. Volume discounts available. I have more than 35 million contact forms. Let's get the conversation started, contact me via Skype here: live:.cid.b4d79bd7b12c4757
Pretty depressing reading if you have a website with a contact form.
Have you been experiencing the same problem? If so, do you have any plans for how to manage it.
Have a great weekend anyway.
Cheers
Dave
Recent Comments
39
Hi Dave,
As the number of posts on my website increased I noticed the spammy messages also increased exponentially. After I got rid of my contact form two years ago I noticed a dramatic decline in these kinds of messages.
At that time I had no idea there was a business about sending messages to websites with contact forms.
When a visitor reads my post they are welcome to leave me comments below. I still get spammy comments, but they are few and far between.
Thanks for validating my decision to ditch the contact form.
Cheers.
Edwin
Hi Edwin
I had suspicions about a business in contact form spamming as i was seeing a steady increase in it but the message to promote it to me just confirmed what I thought.
Time to dump all my contact forms unfortunately.
Thanks
Dave
Hi Dave
I don not have a contact form but I have spam in my comments sometimes even though I have plugin to deter that. It's sad that people try to make money without caring how they do it or who they cause problems for. With all the members on WA, someone has probably found a solution. I hope you connect with a solution, soon.
Regards
Yes the spam comments are a real frustration too but thankfully they should never be seen and can be deleted in one click.
Unfortunately contact form spam means you have to open and read every email to avoid missing any genuine queries from a potential customer.
Thanks
Dave
I don’t have a contact form, Dave but thanks for sharing your experience. I’m not really surprised anymore as there’s so much nonsense going on. Hopefully you find a work around.
Susan
Hi Susan
Sadly I think I will have to remove contact forms from all my sites as this spam is becoming intolerable.
I’m going to try using a non-clickable image of my site email and see how that goes.
Thanks
Dave 🙂
Wow, Dave. I am glad I have never started one yet, though that was on my list. Are there any other alternatives?
Jeff
Hi Jeff
You want people to be able to contact you with genuine enquiries so a contact form used to be the preferred method as people had to enter their name, email and query to use it. (Leaving an email address was just an invitation for spam).
Unfortunately these spammers have now figured out how to blast messages to millions of contact forms at the same time.
Frank has a good suggestion in his comment
Cheers
Dave
See more comments
Hi Dave,
I had the same issue. I had a look through WA and came across this post How to stop contact form spam? The honeypot plugin was suggested. I installed it yesterday and have not received any spam messages since (I used to get 10 or more a day).
It's still early days but so far it is working. (I also read that on a regular basis, they advise to go into the settings of the plugin and change the 'field name'.)
I have not read through all other comments so someone else may have already suggested it.
I have also read about Akismet. I read that it is free for personal use websites but a subscription is required for businesses.
Hope this helps.
Edith