Spam Protection

Formkove has two layers of spam protection: a built-in honeypot field (free) and Cloudflare Turnstile captcha (all plans).

Honeypot (Free)

Bots fill out every input field they find. A honeypot field is hidden from real users but visible to bots. If it’s filled with any value, the submission is treated as spam and silently ignored.

Setup Steps

1. Configure the Field Name: In your Formkove dashboard, navigate to Settings → Honeypot Protection for your form and enter a custom honeypot field name (e.g. _gotcha or website_url). By default, honeypot protection is disabled until a field name is configured.
2. Add to Form: Add an input field with that exact name to your form, hidden via CSS. A text input is recommended for honeypots:

<input type="text" name="YOUR_HONEYPOT_NAME" style="display:none" tabindex="-1" autocomplete="off">

Keep the field name generic (like _gotcha or website_url) so bots are lured into filling it out.

Note: Some advanced bots can detect hidden fields. For stronger protection, add Cloudflare Turnstile.

Cloudflare Turnstile

Turnstile is Cloudflare’s privacy-first captcha. Unlike reCAPTCHA, it doesn’t track users across the web, and there’s no per-submission fee. You bring your own Cloudflare keys.

Setup Steps

1. Get Cloudflare Turnstile keys

1. Sign in to Cloudflare Dashboard
2. Go to Turnstile → Add a widget
3. Choose “Managed” widget type
4. Copy your site key (public) and secret key (private)

2. Add the Turnstile script to your page

<script src="https://challenges.cloudflare.com/turnstile/v0/api.js" async defer></script>

3. Add the widget to your form

<form action="https://app.formkove.com/api/forms/YOUR_FORM_ID/submissions" method="POST">
    <!-- Your form fields here -->

    <div class="cf-turnstile" data-sitekey="YOUR_SITE_KEY" data-theme="light"></div>

    <button type="submit">Send</button>
</form>

4. Add your secret key to Formkove

1. Open app.formkove.com
2. Go to your form’s Settings → Spam Protection
3. Select Cloudflare Turnstile as the provider
4. Paste your Secret Key
5. Save

Why Turnstile, Not reCAPTCHA?

	reCAPTCHA	Cloudflare Turnstile
User tracking	Tracks users across Google sites	No tracking
Per-submission fee	Yes (Google charges per validation)	No
Privacy	Sends data to Google	Privacy-first
User experience	Can show challenge images	Invisible or minimal widget

Formkove uses Turnstile because it’s better for your users and doesn’t add per-submission costs.

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For AI-based spam scoring and content tagging, see AI Classification.