How are you protecting your Marketo Forms from being spammed?

[Dasha_Davidov]

I'm curious what each of you are doing within your Marketo instance to protect it from bots and spam form fill outs. Or perhaps it's something you're doing on the LP side of things. 

I know of the honey pot method and implementing recaptcha (which is a pain btw) - but has this actually worked for any of you? I need to find a good solution.

Examples please! I know I'm not the only that has been faced with this.

[SanfordWhiteman]

reCAPTCHA does exactly what it's supposed to do - distinguish humans from bots. (This isn't the same as humans filling in bad data vs. humans filling in good data.)

Email validation on the server plus reCAPTCHA is a perfect combo.

Honeypots are imaginary. They don't do anything.

[Dasha_Davidov]

@SanfordWhiteman thanks for your reply. 

Could you please let me know what you've done as far as validation on server side and how you've setup recaptcha?

On the recaptcha side I basically followed this documentation (it's ANCIENT) https://www.evernote.com/shard/s24/client/snv?noteGuid=6476e863-c4c5-4f1d-9094-143069b7c279&noteKey=...

but it was the only thing I was able to find. 

I agree with you on honeypots.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yes, that doc is very outdated. I have a much newer approach that works with reCAPTCHA v3 (just set it up on a new instance yesterday). Will add it to the Products blog within the next week, it's on my to-do list.

For validation on the server we use a commercial service whose name I can't mention here due to community rules, but from the Marketo perspective they all work the same way: call a webhook, get immediate validation response or deferred response, poll the webhook again after a time if deferred response. 

[Tadia_Charles]

Hi @SanfordWhiteman, can you please point me to the blog post you reference? We are having this problem and a team member recommended the honeypot solution.

Thanks,

Tadia

[SanfordWhiteman]

I did a whole presentation on it. You can watch the recording here: https://info.themopros.com/integration-for-marketo-and-google-recaptcha-v3

[Chris_Saporito]

@SanfordWhiteman now that we can add CAPTCHA constraints to triggers & filters for form submissions, are there any additional benefits to the setup you covered on the webinar? We're getting hit with a high volume of spam submissions to one particular form. I tried the honeypot method as well but that's not catching any of these spam submissions. CAPTCHA seems to be fairly accurate, although when filtering raw scores <0.6 I'm still seeing a few valid submissions. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Nope, no need for that approach now that reCAPTCHA is built into Marketo.

Honeypots don’t do anything against spammers with any skill, so we never use ‘em.

There are always some false negatives with reCAPTCHA because some people interact with forms in a less “human” way even though they’re human.

[Tadia_Charles]

Thanks @SanfordWhiteman , I'm trying to follow along with the presentation. Is this the correct link to the code you put in the chat?

Codepin.io/figureone/pen/yLgKXge?editors=1010 y

[Darshil_Shah1]

I guess it should be codepen.io and not codepin.io

https://codepen.io/figureone/pen/yLgKXge?editors=1010

[Tadia_Charles]

That was it, thank you!

[Harish_Gupta6]

@SanfordWhiteman  Hi Sandy, please suggest if you have published your blog.

Thanks

Harish G