Anti Spam

Publicly available forms with no challenge requiring the submitter to verify they are a real person can allow for bots or other malicious actors to clog up your inbox with spam submissions. 

While locking forms down to only allow authenticated users to make submissions is a great way to curb this, it isn't feasible in many circumstances. Adding a CAPTCHA challenge to your EasyForms, or by using Google's reCAPTCHA, can help prevent these spam responses.

• CAPTCHA is a security measure that uses simple, human-centric challenges to distinguish real users from automated bots
• reCAPTCHA analyzes a combination of factors to determine if a user is human, such as how a user interacts with the page, browser and cookie analysis, and more

Neither option is completely infallible due to ever-evolving technology and AI, but use of these tools can help reduce spam submissions from publicly available forms. 

Configuring anti-spam tools 

As discussed in the Creating EasyForms article, a variety of elements can be added to your forms, including a CAPTCHA element. The following settings discuss how to enable reCAPTCHA as well as setting the default challenge type for the CAPTCHA element. 

1. From the Dashboard, click the System Configuration tile
2. Click the Site Configuration tile, then click the Anti Spam tab on the left
   1. reCaptcha (may require registration as described in the tip above)
      1. General Settings 
         1. Site Key, enter the site key provided
         2. Secret Key, enter the secret key provided
         3. Local domain name validation, check this box to check the hostname on you server when verifying a solution
         4. Use reCAPTCHA globally, check this box in circumstances (or countries) where www.google.com is not accessible
   2. Captcha Settings
      1. Form protection
         1. Default challenge type, select the appropriate default challenge type (this can be overridden when creating or editing an EasyForm), choose from:
            1. Math
            2. Image
            3. reCaptcha (only applicable if you subscribe to reCAPTCHA)
3. Click Save configuration at the bottom of the page when done