Forms are an essential part of any website, enabling visitors to get in touch, subscribe, or request information. But when spam bots flood your Sitecore forms with junk submissions, it can quickly become a problem, messing with your data, wasting resources, and making genuine leads harder to manage. In this post, we’ll explore practical and effective tips to keep our Sitecore forms protected from spam, helping us maintain clean data and a smoother user experience.
Why Spam Submissions Are a Problem in Sitecore Forms
Spam submissions aren’t just annoying—they can seriously impact our website’s performance and team’s productivity. When bots flood your forms with fake data, it becomes harder to identify genuine leads, analyse user feedback, or maintain clean records. Over time, this can lead to wasted time sifting through irrelevant submissions and even affect your marketing and sales efforts.
Common reasons why spam happens in Sitecore forms include:
- Bots targeting publicly accessible forms.
- Lack of proper validation or verification on form fields.
- Forms without anti-spam mechanisms like CAPTCHA or honeypots.
Understanding these causes helps us implement the right solutions to keep our Sitecore forms secure and reliable.
To prevent spam form submissions in Sitecore, multiple approaches can be implemented. These include utilizing Sitecore’s native robot detection features, integrating CAPTCHAs to check for human users, applying anti-forgery tokens to secure forms against automated attacks, and adding honeypot fields to catch and block bots. Combining these techniques helps ensure robust protection against spam.
Here’s a breakdown of the techniques
1. Sitecore’s Built-in Robot Detection
- Sitecore Forms offers a built-in “Robot detection” feature that can be enabled or disabled.
- This feature is found within the Form elements pane, on the Settings tab.
- Enabling “Robot detection” in Sitecore automatically identifies and blocks automated form submissions, reducing spam and ensuring valid entries.
2. Implementing CAPTCHA
- Google reCAPTCHA is a common and effective method to prevent spam.
- They require users to complete a challenge (e.g., selecting images, solving puzzles) that is easy for humans but difficult for bots.
- Sitecore supports the integration of reCAPTCHA into forms to help prevent automated spam submissions.
- To implement, you’ll need to obtain API keys (Site Key and Secret Key) from Google and configure them within your Sitecore instance.
3. Using Honeypot Fields
- Honeypots are hidden fields on the form that are invisible to human users but are filled out by bots.
- Submissions containing data in the honeypot field are blocked, as this is a clear sign of bot activity and helps prevent spam.
- This technique involves adding an extra field (e.g., type=”text” or input) to the form and hiding it using CSS.
- The server-side code then checks if this field is populated during form submission.
- Read a full implementation guide here.
4. Anti-forgery tokens
- Sitecore includes a built-in anti-forgery feature designed to help protect web applications from Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. This security mechanism ensures that form submissions come from authenticated and trusted sources by validating anti-forgery tokens. These tokens are automatically generated and validated by Sitecore, with the ASP.NET anti-forgery framework, providing developers with a simple and integrated way to secure forms and user interactions without extensive manual configuration.
- You can verify anti-forgery configuration settings in /sitecore/admin/showconfig.aspx.
5. Server-Side Validation and Other Considerations
- Validate all inputs: Make sure that all mandatory fields are validated on both the client and server sides.
- Implement timeout checks: Track the time taken for form submission and flag submissions that occur too quickly as potential spam.
- Consider custom solutions: Explore custom code or third-party modules that offer advanced spam detection and prevention techniques.
- Regularly review submissions: Track form submissions for irregular patterns to detect potential spam sources.
- Keep your contact lists clean: Regularly remove invalid email addresses and inactive users from your contact lists to minimize spam.
Conclusion
By combining these techniques, you can significantly reduce the amount of spam submissions reaching your Sitecore forms, improving the overall health and efficiency of your website and contact lists.
