FINALLY got around to investigating this further and realized the plugin has been using wpcf7_add_shortcode since version 1.10 of this plugin. You shouldn’t be seeing errors in your logs about it. The only reason it would be popping up in the logs that I can figure is if you are using an older version of CF7 that doesn’t yet support wpcf7_add_form_tag, and thus requires wpcf7_add_shortcode for backwards compatibility. What version of CF7 are you running?

You’re right, that doesn’t make sense. I’m really not sure what could have caused it. Maybe it wasn’t an updated version (pre-v1.10) of the Honeypot plugin? Here’s the code that’s been in place since v1.10, released about 3 years ago.

I have verbose logging on, and couldn’t reproduce the depreciation message in the logs. If you happen to remember the wording of the error, I can dig in a bit more. Here’s the conditional that handles this (for backwards compatibility):

add_action('wpcf7_init', 'wpcf7_add_form_tag_honeypot', 10);
function wpcf7_add_form_tag_honeypot() {

  // Test if new 4.6+ functions exists
  if (function_exists('wpcf7_add_form_tag')) {
    wpcf7_add_form_tag( 
      'honeypot', 
      'wpcf7_honeypot_formtag_handler', 
      array( 
        'name-attr' => true, 
        'do-not-store' => true,
        'not-for-mail' => true
      )
    );
  } else {
    wpcf7_add_shortcode( 'honeypot', 'wpcf7_honeypot_formtag_handler', true );
  }
}