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[Thread] There are a few options for fraud prevention strategy against spam bots: honey pots, time traps, "human" questions, CAPTCHA (among others). Don't offload your technical issues to users by asking them to validate they are humans before you *absolutely* have to.
Any security check might cause friction and abandonment, and potentially raises accessibility concerns. Before using severe mechanisms or third-party scripts, try simple options and measure their success.
Option 1. CSS-only honey pots
— Add two "honey pots" for bots: a hidden checkbox + a hidden input field,
— Turn off autocomplete on these fields (developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web…)
— Hide with CSS, accessibly (advent.perldancer.org/2018/21)
— Reject if at least one of fields isn't empty![<style><br />
.visuallyhidden {<br />
border: 0;<br />
clip: rect(0 0 0 0);<br />
height: 1px;<br />
margin: -1px;<br />
overflow: hidden;<br />
padding: 0;<br />
position: absolute;<br />
width: 1px;<br />
}<br />
</style><br />
<br />
<label class=]()
Don't fill this in!
— Add two "honey pots" for bots: a hidden checkbox + a hidden input field,
— Turn off autocomplete on these fields (developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web…)
— Hide with CSS, accessibly (advent.perldancer.org/2018/21)
— Reject if at least one of fields isn't empty
Don't fill this in!
Option 2: CSS-only honey pots + Human question
— If option 1 alone doesn't work, additionally ask a question that's (hopefully) easy to answer (e.g. the color of the sun, sky etc.)
— Alternatively, use a keyboard-accessible slider and ask users to slide it (esp. for mobile)
— If option 1 alone doesn't work, additionally ask a question that's (hopefully) easy to answer (e.g. the color of the sun, sky etc.)
— Alternatively, use a keyboard-accessible slider and ask users to slide it (esp. for mobile)
Option 3: reCAPTCHA v3 or Invisible CAPTCHA
— Options 1 and 2 don't prevent targeted attacks. reCAPTCHA v3 (needs to be used site-wide for better results) and Invisible reCAPTCHA v2 ("I'm not a robot" checkbox) do help then.
— Beware of tracking and privacy implications.
— Options 1 and 2 don't prevent targeted attacks. reCAPTCHA v3 (needs to be used site-wide for better results) and Invisible reCAPTCHA v2 ("I'm not a robot" checkbox) do help then.
— Beware of tracking and privacy implications.
With all of these options, use blacklists of known spam IPs with services such as CloudFlare or Akismet. Consider using time traps (timeouts) to disrupt repeated attempts. Don't break HTML, don't rely on pointer movements or text-based recognition. Ignore older reCAPTCHA (v1).
Useful resources:
↬ Integrate Honeypot + Case studies
projecthoneypot.org
↬ Accessible honeypot
advent.perldancer.org/2018/21
↬ State of CAPTCHA + alternatives, regularly updated + responsive considerations
tehnoblog.org/google-no-capt…
↬ Integrate Honeypot + Case studies
projecthoneypot.org
↬ Accessible honeypot
advent.perldancer.org/2018/21
↬ State of CAPTCHA + alternatives, regularly updated + responsive considerations
tehnoblog.org/google-no-capt…
There really is no need to impose usability and accessibility issues on your users with a CAPTCHA beauty. Text or image recognition don't provide a better fraud prevention these days, and in fact, most spam bots are much better at recognition than humans: medium.com/mlmemoirs/brea…
