Gravity Forms Spam Shield

Spam filters like reCAPTCHA and Cloudflare Turnstile cut down on spam — but they don't stop all of it. As bots get better (and AI helps them beat challenges), some junk always slips through. The real pain isn't the spam entry itself; it's that every submission fires an admin notification email, so a single automated run can bury an inbox under hundreds or thousands of messages overnight.

Gravity Forms Spam Shield catches what your spam filter misses. It scores each submission as it comes in, silently quarantines the spammy ones as native Gravity Forms spam — so no per-submission email goes out — and then sends the admin a single daily summary of what was blocked. The flood stops, the inbox stays clean, and you still get a once-a-day digest to review for anything caught by mistake.

It runs alongside reCAPTCHA/Turnstile, not instead of them — a second line of defense that you control.

How it works

• Scores every Gravity Forms submission with a tunable, weighted engine.
• Anything at or above your threshold is marked as Gravity Forms spam (no admin email) and recorded in a log.
• Once a day, if anything was blocked, it emails one digest summarizing it — with a link to the spam folder so you can rescue a false positive. Quiet day, no email.

Detection

• Heuristic signals (weighted): gibberish names/text, honeypot field, submit timing & velocity, duplicate/repeated values.
• Admin blocklists (instant block): IP / CIDR ranges, email domains (incl. *.tld wildcards), and keywords.
• Per-signal on/off and weights, an overall score threshold, and per-form exclusions — all under Forms → Spam Shield. A read-only Spam Shield Log shows what's been caught and why.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.4+
• PHP 8.1+
• Gravity Forms

Install

Download the latest vg-gravity-spam-shield-X.Y.Z.zip from the Releases page and upload it via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin. Configure it under Forms → Spam Shield (set at least one digest recipient).

Updates are delivered automatically from this repository's GitHub Releases.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later