Method – Shadow Ban for Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms add-on that shadow-bans submitters by email address or IP.

A matched submission looks completely normal from the sender's side — the form submits, the confirmation shows, and any notification addressed to the submitter is delivered — but nobody else is notified, add-on feeds are (optionally) skipped, and the entry is flagged in the admin UI.

Requires Gravity Forms 2.5+ and PHP 7.4+.

How it works

Everything hangs off the normal GF submission pipeline; nothing is intercepted before the entry is saved.

1. Entry is saved as usual (GFFormsModel::save_lead).

2. GFFormsModel::set_entry_meta() runs the add-on's registered update_entry_meta_callbacks. The submission is tested against the lists once, and the result is written to two entry-meta keys:

   • mgfsb_match — human-readable reason (Email: x@y.com (rule @y.com) / IP: 203.0.113.9 (rule 203.0.113.0/24)), empty when clean. Shown as the "Shadow Ban" column.
   • mgfsb_flagged — 1/0, so the entries filter dropdown can do "Shadow Banned (1/0)" is "1".

3. gform_entry_post_save → feed add-ons run. gform_addon_pre_process_feeds hands them an empty feed list for matched entries (option, on by default).

4. Notifications → every email passes through gform_pre_send_email. For a matched entry the add-on reduces To, Cc and Bcc to addresses the submitter typed into the form's Email fields; if nothing is left the email is aborted (abort_email). So:

   • the admin notification (To: {admin_email}, staff@…) → aborted;
   • the user confirmation (To: {Email:3}) → delivered;
   • a user confirmation that BCCs an archive address → delivered, BCC stripped.

   Addresses that are themselves configured notification recipients on that form (static To, routing rule emails, Cc/Bcc) and the site admin_email are never treated as "the submitter", so typing the admin's address into the Email field doesn't smuggle a "confirmation" into the admin's inbox.

5. gform_after_submission → a note is added to the entry recording what was suppressed (option, on by default).

The on-screen confirmation is never touched.

Because the decision is stored on the entry at save time, later changes to the lists don't retroactively re-flag old entries, and a resend of an old entry uses the stored decision. Entries that predate the add-on (no meta) are evaluated live.

Settings

Forms → Settings → Shadow Ban (capability gravityforms_edit_settings).

Two textareas, one rule per line. # starts a comment; blank lines are ignored. Invalid lines are reported (red icon + status box) but don't block saving — the valid rules still apply.

IPv4-mapped IPv6 (::ffff:203.0.113.7) from dual-stack servers collapses to IPv4 before matching.

Options:

• Also skip add-on feeds (default on) — webhooks, Zapier, Slack, CRM, mailing-list, etc. via gform_addon_pre_process_feeds.
• Add a note to each matched entry (default on).
• Loose email matching (default off) — strips +tags on every domain, and dots in Gmail local parts (googlemail.com → gmail.com), on both the rules and the submitted value.

Admin UI

• Entries list: "Shadow Ban" column with a red badge (enabled by default on forms that haven't customised their columns; add it from the column picker otherwise). Filterable via the standard filter dropdown.
• Entry detail: warning banner at the top of matched entries; a Shadow Ban sidebar box showing the status with one-click Block <email> / Block IP <ip> links. Clicking appends the value to the list (with a # added YYYY-MM-DD from entry #N by user comment) and immediately re-flags that entry.
• Notes: a Shadow Ban note on matched entries.

What the admin can still do

GF's own Resend Notifications (entry sidebar and entries-list bulk action, AJAX action gf_resend_notifications) by a user with gravityforms_edit_entries bypasses suppression — that's the deliberate "I looked at it and I want it sent" path. Nothing else is bypassed: GF's background feed processor also runs through admin-ajax.php and forwards the browser's cookies, so a looser is_admin() check would leak notifications whenever a logged-in admin tests a form.

Known limits

• Payment add-ons (GFPaymentAddOn) select their feed during validation, before gform_addon_pre_process_feeds runs, so a payment can still be authorised/captured for a matched entry. Treat shadow-banning as a notification/feed control, not a payment control.
• The submitter's address has to be in an Email-type field for a confirmation to pass. If a form collects the address in a plain text field, every notification for a matched entry is suppressed (which is the safe failure).
• GF's "Prevent IP storage" setting leaves entry.ip empty. The add-on falls back to the live request IP during the submission itself, so IP rules still apply at submit time; IP-based re-evaluation later isn't possible for those entries.
• Matching is against the IP GF records (GFFormsModel::get_ip(), which honours gform_ip_address). Behind a proxy/CDN make sure GF is seeing the client IP, not the edge.
• # in an email local part is treated as a comment marker.

Hooks

// Override/extend the match decision. Non-empty string = ban with that reason; '' = allow.
add_filter( 'method_gf_shadow_ban_match', function ( $reason, $entry, $form ) { return $reason; }, 10, 3 );

// Adjust which addresses a matched submitter may still receive mail at (lower-cased address => true).
add_filter( 'method_gf_shadow_ban_allowed_recipients', function ( $allowed, $entry, $form, $notification ) { return $allowed; }, 10, 4 );

// Widen/narrow the admin bypass for a given email.
add_filter( 'method_gf_shadow_ban_allow_manual_resend', function ( $allow, $email, $notification, $entry ) { return $allow; }, 10, 4 );

// Per-entry override of the feed suppression option.
add_filter( 'method_gf_shadow_ban_suppress_feeds', function ( $suppress, $feeds, $entry, $form ) { return $suppress; }, 10, 4 );

Programmatic access: method_gf_shadow_ban()->get_match( $entry ) returns the reason string (empty when clean); ->get_matcher() returns the parsed rule set.

Entries can be queried by meta: GFAPI::get_entries( $form_id, array( 'field_filters' => array( array( 'key' => 'mgfsb_flagged', 'value' => '1' ) ) ) ).

Logging goes through the add-on's GF logger (Forms → Settings → Logging → Shadow Ban).

Install / update

Upload the zip through Plugins → Add New, or drop the method-gf-shadow-ban directory into wp-content/plugins. The main file carries GitHub Plugin URI: pixelwatt/method-gf-shadow-ban / Primary Branch: main headers for Git Updater — change or remove them if the repo lives elsewhere.

Uninstalling (either the Plugins screen or Forms → Settings → Uninstall) removes the settings option and the two entry-meta keys from all entries.

Tests

No WordPress or GF install needed:

php tests/test-matcher.php   # rule parsing + email/IP/CIDR matching
php tests/test-addon.php     # suppression logic against a WP/GF stub layer