Hi Jos, here’s my own personal update as I have about 300+ sites using Caldera Forms.
So earlier this year, Ninja Forms decided they weren’t going to continue development of CF after purchasing it last year. They said they are ‘sunsetting’ it at the end of 2021.
Obviously it doesn’t make much sense for the programmer of this reCaptcha plugin to do any more work on it, as CF will slowly start disappearing from websites.
There is a solution that has worked for me in the meantime. A plugin called WP Cerber has an option to ‘Protect all forms with a bot detection engine’, which effectively works like ReCaptcha V3, just without needing to register your sites or get keys or anything
I don’t know whether it is quite as effective as ReCaptcha V3, but it seems to stop the vast majority of spam getting through on sites where I’ve got it installed. Definitely more effective than the old ‘solve this maths question’ approach (which I also tried).
Hi @shaunbowen, thanks for your feedback. I know about the sunsetting of Caldera, but you would hope that Ninja Forms would have picked this up. Even they can’t say when they will support reCaptcha v3. You would think they could work together with the Caldera Forms team and even the author(s) of this Anti Spam extension. But nothing so far…
I’m using Wordfence Security on all sites and I’m not going to install another security suite that might conflict and doesn’t replace the functionality I’m already using. I only need the addition of a free anti spam module.
Hi Jos, yeah I get that, although I do use both security plugins on a number of sites with no issues. If you *only* set the parts you need (ie. Form anti spam) then it seems to make no difference to load speed etc.
I’ll keep that in mind, but I think it’s overkill when the solution should be already available in current plugins (although it needs some fixing) and other form plugins like Contact Form 7, but I don’t really like that plugin for other reasons.
