How to Stop Spam Form Submissions in PHP Using AI

Anywhere users can freely enter text is a target for spam, and that’s especially true of web forms.

Fortunately, trained AI is pretty good at understanding what counts as spam and flagging it. With an AI spam detection API, we can analyze form submissions in the background and return a breakdown of its contents. Most importantly, we can block those spam submissions with top-level response details.

Below, we’ll walk through a quick implementation in PHP.

SDK installation

We’ll start by running this composer command to install the SDK:

composer require cloudmersive/cloudmersive_spam_api_client

Sending the request

After that, we’ll use the below code examples to structure our request body:

<?php
require_once(__DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php');

// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
$config = Swagger\Client\Configuration::getDefaultConfiguration()->setApiKey('Apikey', 'YOUR_API_KEY');

$apiInstance = new Swagger\Client\Api\SpamDetectionApi(


    new GuzzleHttp\Client(),
    $config
);
$body = new \Swagger\Client\Model\SpamDetectionAdvancedFormSubmissionRequest(); // \Swagger\Client\Model\SpamDetectionAdvancedFormSubmissionRequest | Spam detection request

try {
    $result = $apiInstance->spamDetectFormSubmissionAdvancedPost($body);
    print_r($result);
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo 'Exception when calling SpamDetectionApi->spamDetectFormSubmissionAdvancedPost: ', $e->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
}
?>

Our Cloudmersive API key should replace the 'YOUR_API_KEY’ placeholder text.

Our request takes an InputFormFields array where each entry has a FieldTitle and FieldValue , plus three policy toggles: AllowUnsolicitedSales , AllowPromotionalContent , and AllowPhishing . These all default to “false”, but the API lets you change that to “true” if need be.

{
  "InputFormFields": [
    {
      "FieldTitle": "LeadCompanyName",
      "FieldValue": "Acme, Inc."
    }
  ],
  "AllowUnsolicitedSales": false,
  "AllowPromotionalContent": false,
  "AllowPhishing": false
}

The bottom line

If we’re sick of being inundated with spam form submissions, a tool like this can make a huge difference. It’s easy to drop this into any form validation handler as a validation step before the submission heads somewhere downstream.