spam-protection

g# Spam Protection

Spam is a common problem for websites and apps that allow user-generated content or have a public-facing form. Spammers can use automated bots to flood your site with unwanted content, which can degrade the user experience, damage your reputation, and even lead to security issues.

Friendly Captcha helps protect your site from spam by adding a layer of security that can distinguish between legitimate users and malicious (automated) actors. This makes it more difficult and costly for spammers to abuse your site, while allowing legitimate users to access your services without friction.

This challenge is a Proof of Work (PoW) cryptographic puzzle that happens entirely in the background. For an attacker, this challenge will be much more expensive to solve than it is for a legitimate user.

How does it work?

You install the Friendly Captcha widget on the forms you want to protect. When a user or bot interacts with the form, Friendly Captcha makes an assessment of the visitor, and depending on the signals it gathers, it may require the user's device to solve a computationally expensive challenge.

This adds a significant cost to carrying out spam attacks, as automated bots will struggle to solve the challenges at scale. Meanwhile, legitimate users will typically be able to solve the challenges quickly, allowing them to access your services without unnecessary friction.

What about human spammers?

While Friendly Captcha is effective at blocking automated spam bots, it may not be able to prevent spam that is generated by human spammers. While these users may be slowed down by the challenge, they can still potentially submit spam content. To mitigate this, you can implement additional measures such as content moderation, user reporting, or manual review processes to identify and remove spam content that may slip through the automated defenses.

Risk Intelligence helps with this by providing you with risk scores and signals about the browsing session, which can help you identify potentially malicious users. You can use this information to prioritize content for review or to take additional actions against users who are suspected of spamming.

For example, if you are running a forum that is being targeted by spammers, you could use Risk Intelligence to identify users who are posting spam content and take actions such as temporarily banning them, requiring additional verification for their posts, or flagging their content for review.

Getting started

To get started with protecting your site from spam using Friendly Captcha, you can follow our Getting Started guide to install the widget on your forms. Additionally, you can explore our Risk Intelligence product to enhance your ability to identify and mitigate spam generated by human spammers.