Submissions, Leads & Spam Protection

Modified on Mon, 10 Aug at 4:17 PM

This article explains what happens behind the scenes when a visitor submits one of your Lead Forms, where to find the results, and how WorkGuru helps keep junk submissions out.

What happens when someone submits the form

The moment a visitor clicks Submit, WorkGuru:

Checks the required fields are filled in (the four standard fields are always required, plus any custom fields you marked as required).
Finds or creates the Client. WorkGuru looks for an existing Client whose name and email match what was entered. If it finds one, the Lead is attached to that Client. If not, it creates a new Client using the name and email from the form.
Creates the Lead, using the Lead Name and Lead Description from the form, and applies the default Stage, Category and Owner you set on the form.
Saves the custom field answers against the new Lead.

The visitor then sees a short confirmation: “Thanks! We’ll be in touch.” If something goes wrong, they see a message asking them to try again.

Where your Leads appear

New Leads land in your Lead Tracker straight away, in the Stage you chose, assigned to the Owner you chose, and tagged with the Category you chose. Open a Lead to see the full enquiry, including the description the visitor wrote and all the custom field answers. From there your team can work the Lead just like any other — move it through your stages, add notes, convert it to a quote, and so on.

Tip: Because each form applies its own default Owner and Category, using a separate form per website page (or per campaign) makes it easy to route enquiries to the right person and to report on which source your Leads came from.

Built-in spam protection

Public forms attract automated spam, so WorkGuru includes two protections that work automatically — you don’t need to configure anything:

Hidden “honeypot” trap. The form contains an invisible field that real visitors never see or fill in. Automated bots tend to fill in every field, so any submission where this hidden field is completed is silently ignored — the bot thinks it succeeded, but no Lead is created.
Submission rate limit. To stop a flood of rapid-fire submissions, each form accepts a limited number of submissions from the same visitor in a short window. Beyond that, further attempts are briefly turned away with a “too many submissions” message. Normal visitors will never hit this.

For high-traffic public sites: These measures handle everyday spam well. If your site is a frequent target, it’s worth pairing them with protection at your website/hosting level (such as a web application firewall) for a hard, site-wide cap. Your web team can advise.

Managing your forms over time

Editing a form takes effect on your website automatically — visitors always load the latest version, so you never need to re-copy the snippet after a change.
Deleting a form removes it. Any page still using its snippet will no longer show a form, so remove the snippet from your website too.
Multiple forms are fully supported — create as many as you need, each with its own fields, styling, rules and default owner.

Quick troubleshooting

A test submission didn’t create a Lead. Check that all required fields were filled — a missing required field stops the submission. Also confirm you weren’t testing many times in quick succession (the rate limit may have paused you briefly).
Leads are going to the wrong person. Edit the form and update the Default Owner (and Stage/Category if needed).
A custom field answer isn’t showing on the Lead. Make sure the field is ticked as “Include” on the form, and that it wasn’t hidden by a conditional rule at the time of submission (hidden fields aren’t submitted).