Can API_AddRecord complete if required field is blank? Help says no, my table says YES

I have a heavily modified version of the QB Wizard submission form I've been using for years. Spammers are now pinging our website every day, so I thought I'd simply turn on a field as required to slow them down, as I could see they weren't filling out ALL the fields.

So I turned on the phone number field as required. And I still get submissions with blank phone number field. My understanding from QB help, if the phone number doesn't validate, it errors out too. I'm guessing the spammers are submitting text in the field, and QB renders it as blank.

Most of the spammers successful submissions that do have 'phone numbers' are just a couple digits.

I was looking at setting up a more elaborate 'honeypot' field that is straightforward required text, but seeing these get thru made me wary of putting in the effort.

Here's my form header, for what it's worth. What do you think?


<form name=qdbform method=POST onsubmit='return validateForm(this)' encType='multipart/form-data' action=https://xxx.quickbase.com/db/my-db-table?act=API_AddRecord&apptoken=my-not-so-hidden-token>