Better Honeypot Implementation (Form Anti-Spam)

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How do we get rid of these spambots on our site?

Every site falls victim to spambots at some point. How you handle it can effect your customers, and most solutions can discourage some people from filling out your forms.

That's where the honeypot technique comes in. It allows you to ignore spambots without forcing your users to fill out a captcha or jump through other hoops to fill out your form.

This post is purely to help others implement a honeypot trap on their website forms.

Update:

Since implementing the below honeypot on all of my client's websites, we have successfully blocked 99.5% (thousands of submissions) of all our spam. That is without using the techniques mentioned in the "advanced" section, which will be implemented soon.

honeypot spam-prevention forms
3 Answers

We found that a slight (though simple) variation on the suggestions here made a huge difference in the effectiveness of our contact form honeypot. In short, change the hidden field to a text input, and make the bot think it's a password. Something like this:

<input type="text" name="a_password" style="display:none !important" tabindex="-1" autocomplete="off">

You'll note that this mock-password input keeps to the same basic guidelines as the checkbox example. And yes, a text input (as opposed to an actual password input) seems to work just fine.

This apparently minor change resulted in a drastic drop in spam for us.

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