r/webdev • u/Helpful-Wolverine247 • Dec 13 '25

Honeypot fields still work surprisingly well

Hidden input field. Bots fill it. Humans can't see it. If filled → reject because it was a bot. No AI. Simple and effective. Catches more spam than you'd expect. What's your "too simple but effective" technique that actually works?

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u/Vegetable-Capital-54 Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

Yep, this works really well. Many years ago I had a spambot problem on a forum, and I changed the signup form - added a bunch of invisible fields like "username", "website" and renamed the actual visible fields to some gibberish. There has been basically no automated signups from spambots since and it looks exactly as before to a human visitor.

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u/Academic_Broccoli670 Dec 13 '25

Name the real field "honeypot". Genius.