This plugin includes 4 antispam features.
2 features are included in the free version, while other 2 are only available with the premium version.
Antispam feature 1: honeypot
The form has a built-in invisible honeypot antispam feature to block basic bot attacks.
Antispam feature 2: rate limiting
Once a submission is registered, it has to be manually approved by the website administrator.If a user from the same IP makes too many submissions, it's going to be blocked. By default the maximum amount of "pending" submissions is 20. With a "premium" plugin license, you can set a custom amount of pending submissions (1 means for instance that a user can send only 1 dedication, until that's not approved)
Antispam feature 3: IP Blacklisting
For security and antispam reasons the IP is stored along with the dedication. If a user is spamming too much, for instance it's a spam bot causing high traffic on your server, you can copy the IP from the dedications list into the "blacklist IP" field of the settings, and this computer will be permanently blocked froom using the submission form.
Antispam feature 4: Email Blacklisting
Same as IP blacklisting but is based on the user email. This is more for real users than bots and is meant to prevent offending customers to try resubmitting dedications. If you receive too many spam comments from a certain email, and don't want to spend the day deleting them, you can copy and paste the email sddress in the settings of the Dedications plugin. Future submissions will be blocked in advance before further processing.
A final note about forms and spam
We tried to implement the best "silent" spam limiting techniques for the plugin, but this cannot guarantee a 100% efficacy in blocking spammers or spam bot.
Some may say that captchas should be added, but actually this wouldn't solve the problem, in fact modern spambots come with automatica captcha resolvers. This means that you will only make the life of your users more complicated without cutting spam efficiently.
Instead, if you have a spam problem and want to solve it permanently, we recommend implementing Cloudflare on your website, and the plugin Clooudflare Super Page Cache. This will drastically increase the website loading speed, and allows to protect the access to your pages by blocking in advance the access to known spam bots and nasty bot networks.
