About this plugin
EDZNET Honeypot & Timing Guard protects Contact Form 7 forms from bot submissions using three complementary techniques:
Honeypot
A real text input is rendered off-screen (hidden via CSS positioning, not display:none). Bots that fill in visible form fields will often fill this one too, while human visitors never see it.
Timing Guard
A signed timestamp is injected into each form. Submissions arriving faster than the configured minimum time (default: 3 seconds) are rejected as bots. The timestamp is HMAC-signed with your site’s secret key, preventing tampering.
Gibberish Content Detection
The plugin analyses the message, subject and comment fields ( your-message, your-subject, message, subject, comments, comment — customisable with the edz_hp_gibberish_fields filter) for random-looking content — long character strings without spaces, words mixing letters and digits, or vowel-less letter sequences. Bots that fill forms with random noise are caught here. Messages written in languages without spaces between words, such as Chinese, Japanese or Thai, are not treated as random strings.
When spam is detected, CF7 silently drops the mail and logs the reason to its spam log.
No configuration required — just install and activate.