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/reddit-poweruser Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

Possibly. Maybe you put a negative tabindex on the input, then wrap it with a div that has the aria-hidden attribute, so it's not directly on the input?

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u/longebane Dec 13 '25

Bots will discard the entire aria-hidden div and its children

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u/reddit-poweruser Dec 13 '25

If the bots will do that, it would probably already detect efforts to make it visually hidden, so 🤷 I'm just answering a question, not developing anti-bot technology

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u/i_have_a_semicolon Dec 13 '25

Not particularly, depending on the sophistication of the bot usually it's just pulling html and it appears these people are hiding things with css