spam bookings flooding my site

Thanks for the info, @joneiseman – if there’s no other way i’ll probably have to look into that option. just sorted through 498 bookings, 2 were real.

Thanks for your kind offer, @shagimuratov – but after getting more than 1200 bookings in less than 30 mins, I worked out a solution myself in the meantime. maybe this helps someone else, too:

I’m using Events Manager’s Phone field ‘dbem_phone’ as a honey trap – i hid it using CSS and added this code snippet to functions.php (or you can use any code snippet plugin to insert this):

add_filter('em_booking_validate', 'block_booking_if_phone_filled', 10, 2);

function block_booking_if_phone_filled($result, $EM_Booking) {
    // Check the field 'dbem_phone'
    if (isset($_POST['dbem_phone']) && trim($_POST['dbem_phone']) !== '') {
        $EM_Booking->add_error('Actually, you shouldnt even see the field for phone - unless youre a spam bot – Hmm.');
        return false; // block booking
    }

    return $result;
}

this script checks if the input field for phone number ‘dbem_phone’ is empty or not – if it isn’t, the booking gets blocked. since human users can’t even see the field and would leave it empty, only bots get blocked. this works fine for me at the moment – spam bookings have stopped dead.

yay, i guess.

adding a honeypot should maybe be a standard feature of future events manager forms?

fyi @joneiseman

• This reply was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by Oliver Gelbrich.