Gravity Forms Spam Notification

Overview

I think that if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that no one likes spam. Bogus form entries can fill up your Gravity Forms entries with junk, and if you have email notifications turned on, those entries also fill up your inbox. Fortunately, Gravity Forms has built-in integration with Akismet, the WordPress anti-spam plugin. Once activated, suspect entries will automatically be marked as spam, keeping your entries view and inbox clear of unwanted junk.

We’ve been using Akismet with the forms on Gravity Wiz to automatically flag entries as spam, but we noticed that we were getting a lot of false positives on our pre-sales form. Every question we missed was a lost sale, so we built a plugin to send Notification emails when an entry is marked as spam.

When we get a spammed entry Notification, we can take a look to see if it’s actually spam. If it isn’t, we’ll update the status and generate a conversation in HelpScout. When an entry is unmarked as spam, Gravity Forms sends that to Akismet so it can better learn how to identify spam submissions.

1. Overview
2. Using the Plugin
   1. Prerequisites
   2. Create a Spam Notification
3. Summary

Using the Plugin

Prerequisites

In order to use this plugin, you must first verify that you have done these things:

• Install and activate Gravity Forms.
• Install and activate Akismet and register it with a valid API key. It’s free for personal sites, but requires a subscription for commercial sites.
• Activate the Akismet Integration in Forms › Settings.
• Installed and activate the Gravity Forms Spam Notification plugin.

Create a Spam Notification

Spam Notifications are created on a per form basis. Navigate to the Notifications tab inside of any of your forms’ Settings page. Add a new Notification, and set its Event to Entry marked as spam.

Like any other Notification, the subject and message can contain anything you’d like. In our spam notifications, we the Entry ID in the subject. In the body, we output the {all_fields} merge tag and a link to manage the entry below those fields. At a glance, we can see if the submission is a false positive, and if so it’s simply for us to update the status in the Entries view.

And here’s the Notification in my inbox.

Summary

This is a simple plugin aimed to make managing spam entries easier. Let us know how you’re using it. If you have any ideas for how we can improve it, please let us know!