Random, irrelevant submissions (from bots?)

Hi JotForm,

We have a JotForm embedded on our website to collect leads (see it at rangempls.com). Unfortunately, we're being overwhelmed with random, irrelevant submissions, rendering the form practically useless. Our dev team has implemented additional security measures to prevent bot submissions on our website, and the irrelevant submissions continue. I've attached a screenshot of recent submissions so you can see what we're dealing with.

Can you please help?

I'm wondering if bots are attacking the form here, where we haven't implemented the additional security: https://form.jotform.com/53348337964163

-Noah

I would suggest you to add a captcha to your form, this will help you to protect your form against spam, here is a guide that will provide you more  details about it: https://www.jotform.com/help/205-How-to-Add-a-Captcha-Field 

You will also find our Google ReCaptcha widget as well as the Drawing Captcha. 

If the issue still persists, you could also set unique submissions on your form, here's a guide with more information about it: How-to-Set-Unique-Submissions-on-a-Form

If spam is being submitted by a real person, then you would need to take further actions on your website to avoid those IP addresses to access, otherwise they will be able to pass any captcha, but they should be stopped with the unique submissions feature, since it takes their IP and will block them as soon as they submit the form once. 

Hope this helps. 

Thanks for the suggestions, Kevin.

We already have form validation in place on the form that should prevent these submissions, as they don't follow the required pattern for email addresses. But maybe adding a Captcha would do the trick. 

As for the IP-based solution, it appears the submissions are coming from all over the place. So that probably wouldn't work. 

Hi Kevin,

Further investigation reveals that some of the IP addresses from which the irrelevant submissions originate are known for malicious activity. Does JotForm have a means to blacklist known malicious IPs from submitting our form?

-Noah

We can block users from accessing the site but if the IP is constantly changing, it would not matter.  Forms are subject to the same traffic as any other publicly available page and simply blocking a list of IP's is futile. 

You could add an email validator widget to your form:

https://widgets.jotform.com/widget/e-mail_validator

This would at least require users to validate their email address before they can submit the form.