Understanding Bots and Spammers
4 min read
Bots and spammers can flood your site with spam emails, irrelevant forum posts, and fake members. These actions can damage your reputation and make it harder for you to manage your site.
Learn how bots work and what you can do to help prevent them from affecting your site.
In this article, learn more about:
How bots and spammers work
A bot is a computer program that does an automated repetitive task. Some bots can be beneficial to your site, such as search engine crawlers that scan your site for changes and reflect them in search results. However, other types of bots can be detrimental to your site, such as spambots.
Spambots aim to send pre-prepared content such as emails and forum posts to as many people as possible. Spambots are designed to sound like human users in the way they write, but they are not usually able to sustain an interaction with a real human.
For example, a spambot may sign up to be a member of your site, then send irrelevant emails to all of your members. This can make it harder to see genuine emails in their inboxes. Spambots can also be more than just annoying. They can create issues for your users if the content they send contains malicious links, malware, or scams. This can also damage your site's reputation.
Another example of a malicious bot is one that adds a large number of fake members to your site. This results in your members' list being filled with fake email addresses and makes it harder for you to identify real members.
Protecting your site from bots and spammers
You can customize your site member settings and your Wix Forms settings to help protect it from bots and spammers. Follow the tips below to help keep your site safe.
Note:
This information refers to the old Wix Forms. The new Wix Forms are automatically integrated with spam filters. These filters automatically filter out submissions from blacklisted IPs and email addresses.
New Wix Forms also integrate with a site viewer CAPTCHA (or invisible CAPTCHA). These CAPTCHAs are not visible in the form, but analyze a site visitor's behavior. If activity is considered suspicious (e.g. potential bot activity) a CAPTCHA challenge appears in the form submission.
Asking your new members to confirm their email
You can choose to send a confirmation email to your new site members when they join. This ensures that they signed up with an active email address that they own.
You have the option to request confirmation from:
- Only new members who are already in your contacts: Contacts are automatically created, for example, when someone purchases something from your site. With the toggle disabled in your Signup & Login Security settings, only new site members who are already in your contacts will need to confirm their email. This is the default email confirmation status and cannot be disabled.
- Everyone who signs up: All new site members will be asked to confirm their email address. We recommend enabling this for added security.
You can enable this setting in the Signup & Login Security section of your dashboard.
Learn more about managing signup, login, and security settings for your site members.
Adding a reCAPTCHA field to signup and login forms
You can add reCAPTCHA fields to your signup and login forms that site visitors need to check. If they don't check the field, they won't be able to continue to the member's area of your site.
You can enable the reCAPTCHA field for your site members in the Signup, Login, and Security section of Site Member Settings in your dashboard. You can choose to show the reCAPTCHA boxes only to suspected bots or to everyone.
Adding a reCAPTCHA field to your Wix Forms
You can also add reCAPTCHA fields to your Wix Forms to protect your site from spam. This creates a checkbox on your form that your site visitors will need to check before they can submit it.
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