Send to Friend madness

I have added this function (below) to try to grab a user’s ip address, and then added the [show_ip] shortcode within the Send Email to Friend and Email Enquiry options. It does not parse the shortcode. Is there another way to achieve this, as the spam continues to flow and reCaptcha is not slowing it, nor is css’ing it out working (did not figure that would work, but tried).

// Display User IP in WordPress

function get_the_user_ip() {
if ( ! empty( $_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’] ) ) {
//check ip from share internet
$ip = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_CLIENT_IP’];
} elseif ( ! empty( $_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’] ) ) {
//to check ip is pass from proxy
$ip = $_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR’];
} else {
$ip = $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’];
}
return apply_filters( ‘wpb_get_ip’, $ip );
}

add_shortcode(‘show_ip’, ‘get_the_user_ip’);

Good day Laurence.

I think I am confused. I already installed the GD reCaptcha plug-in, but it still was appearing to let through masses of spam. Had to eventually shut off mailing altogether to get it to stop.

Are you referring to something I should be doing with the plug-in beyond what is normally done?