Honeypot in Pardot Form Handlers

Photo by Pau Casals on Unsplash

What is a honeypot?

A honeypot is a hidden field that is visible to bots but not humans. When a bot fills out a form, the bot sees the hidden field and fills it out. To a human, the field is invisible and hence submitted as a blank entry.

HTML side implementation

<div style="position:absolute; left:-9999px; top: -9999px;">
    <label for="pardot_extra_field">Comments</label>
    <input type="text" id="pardot_extra_field" name="pardot_extra_field">
</div>

You can add the honeypot field to your HTML forms just above the submit button that you have integrated with Pardot form handlers. This field is hidden from humans due to the inline CSS styling applied.

Pardot side implementation

1. Create a completion action on the form handler to add all submissions to a list.
2. Create an Engagement Studio Program in Pardot which will filter all entries against spam
3. Move all identified spam entries to a spam list so that it can be easily deleted manually later.