Add Honeypot to Simplenews subscription form block

The Drupal Honeypot module (https://drupal.org/project/honeypot) works well out of the box for comments and web forms in nodes.

In my case i needed to add the Honeypot spam filter to a Simplenews (https://drupal.org/project/simplenews) newsletter subscription form, which resides inside a block in the sidebar of most pages.

The problem here was that if the time restriction feature is active, the Honeypot module disables the cache on pages where it is used (which is on most pages). I could have disabled this feature all together, but it is just another layer of protection that i didn’t want to loose.

So the way to get around this is to target a specific form and add or alter the Honeypot feature specifically. This is done by creating a custom module.

Step by step

Create a folder in the module section (sites/all/modules), and give it the name of your module. Example: overwrite_simplenews

Add two files to the folder.

  1. overwrite_simplenews.info
  2. overwrite_simplenews.module

The .info file should contain something like this (change as required):

name = Overwrite Simplenews
description = Customization
package = Mail
core = 7.x

The .module file should contain something like this (change as required):

/* Add Honeypot to simplenews subscription form */

function kleinermann_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id){
	if ($form_id == 'REPLACE_WITH_FORM_ID') {
		honeypot_add_form_protection($form, $form_state, array('honeypot'));
	}
}

You need to replace REPLACE_WITH_FORM_ID with the ID of the form you want to target. To find the form ID, you can check your page source in the browser with Firebug, or if the theme doesn’t output this information, you can use the Devel module. After activation of the Devel module, put this inside your module to output the form ID:

function kleinermann_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id){
   dsm ($form);
   dsm ($form_id);
}

For more details check out this great video by Peter Yaworski: https://www.torontowebsitedeveloper.com/drupal-video-tutorials/drupal-6-simplenews-subscription-block-override-tutorial-1-2

If you check the form now in the source of your browser output you should find that there is an extra hidden field in your subscription form, named as specified in the Honeypot settings page.

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