How to prevent bot sign ups

The speaker delves into the pervasive issue of bots causing disruptions for businesses of all sizes, particularly through sign-up forms. It underscores the necessity for companies to continuously evolve their strategies to combat bot activity effectively. Public sign-up forms are identified as particularly vulnerable to bot attacks, necessitating the implementation of robust protective measures. These measures range from traditional captchas to more advanced techniques, with an emphasis on employing multiple strategies for detection and mitigation. The speaker shares personal experiences of implementing such measures, highlighting the tangible success achieved. Ultimately, the video concludes with a call to action for viewers to proactively address bot sign-ups and ensure they have comprehensive protective plans in place.

Summary

Risks Posed by Bots:

• Discussion on the importance of having evolving strategies to protect against bots, particularly in relation to sign-up forms.

Challenges with Public Sign-up Forms:

• Explanation of the vulnerability of public sign-up forms to bot attacks and the necessity for protective measures.

Protective Measures:

• Overview of various protective measures against bot sign-ups, including captchas, re-captchas, and other advanced techniques.
• Emphasis on the need for multiple strategies to detect and handle bot sign-ups effectively.

Experience and Success:

• Sharing personal experience with implementing protective measures against bot sign-ups and the positive outcomes achieved.

Conclusion:

• Encouragement for viewers to take action against bot sign-ups and ensure they have a plan in place.

Podcast

Check out on Spotify.

Transcript

0:01

Hey there, I hope you’re doing well. In this video, let’s talk about bots, focusing on one aspect: not the good ones, but the bad ones. If you’re a small company or a startup and you think you wouldn’t have to worry about bots causing you issues, let me tell you something: you’re wrong. So it doesn’t matter whether you’re big or small, super big or super small.

0:20

You have to have an answer, and that answer has to continually evolve and change to protect yourself and your systems from bots. So I won’t go into a whole level of detail in this video, but I’ll give you a high-level overview. If you have specific questions or need some help, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or something.

0:36

So, if you have a form, a sign-up form of any kind, it is possible. If it’s a public sign-up form where the user enters an email and password, or just an email and you want them to choose to follow you so you can send them email notifications, etcetera, anything that’s public and that’s a form, there’s a possibility and a high probability, unfortunately, that it will get hit by bots. And I tell you this from experience, right? So you have to do not just one thing, but probably a set of things to protect yourself.

1:16

As to what those are, I’ll just give you an overview. I don’t want to go into the details specifically, intentionally because we’ve done a ton of things to protect our systems from bots and their requests. So honestly, I can’t say everything that we’ve done, but I can tell you that we’ve done more than one thing, more than two things, more than three things. There’s a number of things that we’ve done to catch and handle requests that could be submitted by non-humans, right?

1:50

So if you forget everything else from this video, just remember that you have to have a plan and an answer to, “Okay, what happens if a bot does a sign-up? How are you going to handle this? How can you detect that it is a bot signing up and not a human?” There’s many things that you could do. You could implement captchas, reCAPTCHAs, and even some standard things that you could do to integrate with plugins, but you can go over and beyond and do a number of other things as well. So we’ve done quite a number of things, and since we’ve done that, I’m glad to say, touchwood, that we’ve had like zero issues with bot sign-ups.

2:30

So hopefully, that gives you an idea, just that you have to do something.

Thank you.

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