Spotlight: Building an Opt-out Form with GP Blocklist

When I was growing up, my friend’s dad ran a well-known regional business award. Back then, most of his research happened in person—relying on word of mouth to uncover which businesses were highlights of the community.

Nowadays, many award organizers take a more digital approach, using public award nomination forms to surface valuable nominees they might not have discovered otherwise.

That’s a much easier way to gather insights—no more in-person interviews—but it can leave the door open to spam hitting the form and, if automatic notifications are involved, reaching nominees too. Still, the convenience and potential to uncover hidden gems often make it worth finding the right balance—or a clever way to have your cake and eat it too.

The latter is what Joe Clifton at Delta Echo Victor achieved… with the help of a bit of magic.

Joe’s cake

Joe manages a regional business award website for one of his clients. On the site, there’s a public nomination form where anyone—anonymously or not—can nominate a business for exceptional service, remarkable innovation, or inspiring commitment.

In this setup, nominees automatically receive an email letting them know they’ve been nominated and inviting them to participate in the awards. Joe kept that in mind while building the form. 🧠

The form needed to be simple to encourage nominations, but I didn’t want the award organizer’s reputation getting harmed if the form was abused, so I set up a few different layers of protection.

Joe’s initial protection spells covered all the bases to prevent your typical form spam:

• CAPTCHA to stop bots from the get-go.
• GP Email Validator to ensure that only valid emails were being used.
• GP Limit Submissions to control how many times individuals were submitting the form.

However, even with all those protective charms in place, Joe’s wizardy senses were still tingling. The website’s server was shielded from being flooded with submissions—which is awesome—but the idea of businesses receiving multiple nominations when they might not want to participate didn’t sit right with him, and for good reason.

Any misuse could harm the client’s reputation and even impact the mail servers sending the messages.

Joe knew he needed a way for uninterested businesses to fully opt out of the awards—like a blocklist of sorts—so they wouldn’t be bothered by multiple automated emails. But he wasn’t quite sure how to make the spell work…

After reaching out to our support team with a suggestion, he walked away with an unexpectedly enchanting solution—courtesy of one of our humbler perks: GP Blocklist.

Unblocking the block

GP Blocklist lets you block specific words or phrases from being submitted through your forms by validating a field’s value against the WordPress Disallowed Comment Keys. While it’s commonly used to block IPs or moderate unwanted language (think: blocking words like “mudblood”), Joe is using it to block certain email addresses from being submitted.

To get those emails into the blocklist, Joe built an opt-out form using the Modifier: Add to Blocklist snippet. The form allows uninterested businesses to seamlessly add their emails to the Disallowed Comment Keys themselves, eliminating the chance of them being nominated again.

How it works: This snippet introduces a :blocklist merge tag modifier to GP Blocklist’s functionality. When applied to any field merge tag, the modifier generates a secure URL that, when clicked, adds that field’s value (in this case, the business’ email) to the Disallowed Comment Keys, effectively adding it to GP Blocklist’s blocklist—and blocking future nominations. 🚫

Icing on the cake

Joe’s implementation of this blocklist functionality covers all the bases:

When someone nominates a business, the nominated business receives an email letting them know they were nominated for this particular business award.

If they are not interested, they click on the unsubscribe link, which then takes them to the opt-out form. This measure includes an extra layer of confirmation, preventing accidental blocks due to misclicks.

After submitting the “Unsubscribe” form, the business receives one final confirmation email. That email includes the merge tag link powered by the :blocklist merge tag modifier, which—when clicked—adds the provided email address to the Disallowed Comment Keys, ensuring they won’t be nominated again.

Prevention is the best treatment

The combination of GP Email Validator, GP Limit Submissions, and GP Blocklist is really the only reliable way to run a form that accepts anonymous public submissions sent to a user-entered email—without the risk of abuse. Any misuse could have harmed my client’s reputation and even affected the mail servers sending the messages, so I wanted a multi-faceted approach that wouldn’t impact the user experience. Gravity Wiz made that possible.

The missing piece of the puzzle was giving email recipients a way to opt out of future messages—but thanks to Gravity Wiz’s awesome support, that became possible too. They provided a snippet that added a new tag modifier, which allowed me to create the opt-out form. Their support genuinely goes above and beyond to deliver a great experience.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Joe! Thank you for sharing your story with us. 🧙

Check out Joe’s work over at Delta Echo Victor. Do you have an interesting use for this GP Blocklist functionality? Tell us all about it in the comments. 👇