If your nonprofit accepts donations online, there’s a problem you may not even know you have: automated bots are constantly targeting donation forms across the web, testing stolen credit card numbers, faking transactions, and running up fees on your payment processor.
It happens quietly, in the background, and most nonprofits only notice when they get hit with chargebacks or strange activity reports.
Charitable Pro 1.8.16 introduces DonationGuard 🛡️, a built-in protection system designed to stop these attacks before they do real damage, without any technical expertise required to use it.
What Is DonationGuard?
Until now, protecting your donation forms meant piecing together separate tools: a spam-blocking challenge here, a submission limiter there, maybe a list of blocked addresses. You had to hope the setup was catching the right things without frustrating real donors in the process.
DonationGuard changes that entirely. It monitors your forms in real time, learns what normal donation activity looks like on your site, and flags coordinated attacks the moment they start.
When it spots something suspicious, it creates an Attack Record, assigns it a priority level based on how serious it is, and presents everything on a single screen so you can review and respond without digging through technical log files.
See it in action below:
How DonationGuard Works
Most bot defenses work by checking one thing: did this request pass a specific test? Experienced bots figure out exactly where that line is and stay just under it. DonationGuard works differently. Instead of relying on a single test, it looks at many signals at once, weighs them together, and calibrates itself to what normal activity looks like on your specific site.
⚡ Looks at the whole picture: DonationGuard tracks patterns like how many payments are failing, whether submissions are coming in from many different locations at once, and how fast forms are being submitted. One unusual event will not trigger a false alarm. A coordinated bot attack will.
🎯 Clear priorities, not a flood of noise: Each flagged attack is ranked by how serious it is, so you always know what needs your attention first. And if a wave of bot activity hits at once, you can address all of it in a single click.
🪤 Two silent traps built in: DonationGuard includes two invisible filters that catch basic bots before they can reach your payment processor. Real donors never see or feel them.
Where to Find It in Your Dashboard
DonationGuard lives in two familiar places inside Charitable, so there is no new menu to learn.
⚙️ Settings » Security » DonationGuard: Turn DonationGuard on, choose whether it should automatically block attacks or just record them for your review, and adjust how sensitive the detection is. One click on Apply Recommended Settings gets you a solid starting configuration with no guesswork required.
📋 Tools » Logs » Bot Events: Browse every flagged attack, sort by severity, click into any record to see exactly what triggered it, or clear a whole batch of alerts at once.
📬 Email alerts: When DonationGuard detects something serious, you get a notification with a direct link back to the relevant record so you can act fast.
DonationGuard Will Only Get Better
DonationGuard launches with Charitable Pro 1.8.16, but this is just the start. We’ll keep improving it based on patterns we see in the real world, not just internal testing. The system was built to grow, with new detection rules added over time as threats evolve. The more it’s used, the sharper it gets.
Also New in Charitable Pro 1.8.16
DonationGuard is the headline of the 1.8.16 release, but there’s plenty more in this update worth knowing about.
💳 PayPal Commerce Account Type: Tell PayPal whether you’re a nonprofit or a standard business so it applies the right fees, dispute handling, and reporting. Nonprofits unlock PayPal’s discounted donation fee tier.
📣 PushEngage Integration: Send browser push notifications to donors at key campaign moments, with ready-made message templates and automatic analytics tracking built in. Read the full announcement »
🗺️ Campaigns Map Block: Show one or all of your campaigns on an interactive map, with custom pins, campaign photo popups, and an optional search box so visitors can find campaigns near them.
🌍 Geolocation Upgrades: Choose between Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, follow a guided setup if you use Google, set your preferred distance units, and use free maps with no account or API key required.
✏️ Donor Comments on Offline Donations: Add a donor comment, with an optional Anonymous toggle, when entering or editing a manual donation.
🛡️ Cloudflare Turnstile Hidden Mode: A new option that keeps your spam filter completely invisible to donors unless it’s actually needed, under Settings » Security » Captcha.
On the improvements side, this release also adds WP-Optimize to the list of supported caching plugins, with automatic detection in both the payment gateway health monitor and the Site Health check.
Get Started with DonationGuard
If you are already running Charitable Pro, head to your WordPress dashboard and run the update. DonationGuard starts working automatically once the update is complete. Take a couple of minutes to visit Settings » Security » DonationGuard, click Apply Recommended Settings, and then check Tools » Logs » Bot Events to see what it’s already catching.
Read the DonationGuard Documentation →
Not Yet a Charitable Pro User?
Charitable powers donation forms for more than 1 million nonprofits, churches, schools, and grassroots campaigns. Charitable Pro adds payment gateways, detailed reporting, the full campaign builder, and now DonationGuard, all in one plugin with no per-donation fee taken from your contributions.
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