Understanding Bots and Spammers

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.

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. 

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. 

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:

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.

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.

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.