Written by the editorial team at Gravity Wiz…
Seeing spam come through your forms is frustrating. But trying to stop it with visible CAPTCHA challenges can add extra work for real visitors too. And for some, that’s enough to abandon the form.
That’s one of the reasons we built Spam Hexer, our free spam-fighting plugin for Gravity Forms. It checks for spam quietly, without adding another step for real visitors just trying to submit the form.
Let’s look at how it works. But first…
Note: Gravity Wiz is a third-party certified developer and its add-ons are not supported by Gravity Forms. As always, we recommend you extensively evaluate all plugins to ensure their suitability for your purpose before installation on your website.
How much can a CAPTCHA actually cost you?
Turns out, quite a bit. Forrester found that 21% of US online adults said they often abandoned an online transaction because of bot-management challenges like CAPTCHA.
That doesn’t mean we should drop CAPTCHAs altogether. Of course, they do an important job. The problem is when that job becomes another hurdle between a visitor and submitting the form. That can start costing you conversions.
How does Spam Hexer check for spam in the background?
Spam Hexer starts with Proof of Work, a small puzzle that runs automatically in the visitor’s browser while they fill out the form. Most spam bots skip the page and submit directly instead, so they never complete that check.
For spam that still gets through, you can add AI Classification as a second layer. It looks at the submission itself and checks whether it makes sense for your form.
And for real visitors, there’s nothing extra to do. They just fill out the form and submit like they normally would.
How can you see what Spam Hexer is catching?
Spam Hexer adds an analysis meta box to every saved entry that goes through it, showing what happened with Proof of Work, AI Classification, or both.
If something doesn’t look right, you can check the entry to see why it was flagged as spam – or why it wasn’t.
How does Spam Hexer hold up in the real world?
We use Spam Hexer on our own Gravity Wiz website too. Since putting it to work, we’ve been able to cancel our Akismet subscription, deactivate Cloudflare Turnstile, and dramatically reduce spam across our forms and WordPress comments too.
In one 30-day stretch alone, Spam Hexer identified more than 11,000 spam submissions on our site.
And all without making real visitors deal with a CAPTCHA.
Try Spam Hexer today!
Check out the Spam Hexer documentation to start fighting spam on your forms – and WordPress comments too.
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PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
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