Comment by JangoSteve
3 days ago
This was a common approach called a "honeypot". As I recall, bots eventually overcame this approach by evaluating visibility of elements and only filling out visible elements. We then started ensuring the element was technically visible (i.e. not `display: none` or `visibility: hidden`) and instead absolutely positioning elements to be off screen. Then the bots started evaluating for that as well. They also got better at reading the text for each input.
Each step in that chain is harder to do and more computationally expensive.