Though many wordpress bloggers talked about email spam from wordpress contact forms, it was never a problem here… until yesterday. It seems someone found a security loophole in the php script that powered the contact form and my email inbox was filled with spam emails. It was time to upgrade to a more secure WordPress contact form.
If you can believe it, my current design is the outcome of hundreds (maybe thousands!) of edits to the original beautiful Blix wordpress theme and the Blix contact form (php script) is an inbuilt part of the blog. Now in a search to find a new contact form, a large number of contact form wordpress plugins were available.
Confused, I asked a friend who was using the WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection by Douglas Karr. I installed the wordpress contact form in minutes, and the email spam stopped instantly.
Installation was very simple. Copy the plugin wp-contact-form folder to the plugin directory. Enable the plugin. Go to Options and customize it and change the challenge question and answer if you’d like (a simple math problem that stops spam easily. 2+2=4 kid stuff you say!).
I simply inserted a code into my contact page (by going to page editor) and all was working fine. Goodbye to email spam forever…. hopefully.
Here are some best practices for contact forms. Which wordpress contact form do you use for spam protection?