A Different Breed of Blocker: Understanding This Custom Solution
Before we dive into the code, it’s important to understand what this WordPress/Pardot form enhancement is and what it isn’t.
This is NOT a replacement for tools like:
- reCAPTCHA / Cloudflare Turnstile: These services are primarily designed to distinguish between human users and automated bots. Our solution doesn’t perform bot detection.
- Akismet (or similar WordPress spam filtering plugins): These tools typically use complex algorithms and vast databases to catch common spam characteristics across comments and form submissions, often within the WordPress environment itself.
- General-purpose WordPress form security plugins: Many plugins offer broad security features for WordPress forms.
So, what makes this solution unique?
- Targeted Blocking via Custom Lists: This method is about explicitly blocking submissions from known, unwanted individual email addresses or entire email domains that you define. You maintain the blocklist on your WordPress site.
- Pardot Layout Template Customization: This is a custom code solution that you implement directly within a Pardot Layout Template. It requires a working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as an understanding of how Pardot Layout Templates are structured.
- WordPress Backend for Blocklist Management: While other WordPress plugins might offer a simple CSV upload to manage blocked emails/domains for WordPress forms, this solution leverages a WordPress backend (specifically via the “Advanced Forms Blocker” plugin in our example) to serve this list to your Pardot forms via an API.
Think of it as a precision tool. If you have specific problematic email addresses or disposable domains you want to prevent from submitting your Pardot forms, this provides a direct way to do it, with the blocklist managed conveniently in WordPress.
Prerequisites for the WordPress Backend (as demonstrated):
To make the JavaScript code in this demo layout template function as intended for fetching blocklists, your WordPress installation will need:
- Gravity Forms: This popular WordPress form builder plugin.
- Advanced Forms Blocker Plugin: This WordPress plugin (which often works in conjunction with Gravity Forms) is assumed to be the component providing the API endpoint (/wp-json/afb/v1/list) from which the Pardot script will fetch the blocked emails, domains, and custom messages.
Try it out! Download the layout template, form template and be sure to read the readme on github.