As the Invision Community platform continues to evolve, so do the precarious ploys of pesky bots.
Oftentimes spammers, whether they are bots or actual humans, spam your community with links in an effort to boost their website’s SEO.
There are already a number of ways in the Invision Community platform to fight against spam, including…
- Our native Spam Defense built into the platform that scores a newly-registered member
- Placing new registrations into a moderator queue
- Adding word filters that, when triggered, put the member in a moderation queue
We also integrate with various CAPTCHAs. You might be unfamiliar with the term, but you’ve definitely participated with one. It’s a digital gatekeeper in the form of an interactive puzzle that asks you to find patterns or similar images in order to evade malicious bots from taking action, whether that’s submitting a spam email, comment or registering an account.
Our existing CAPTCHA defenses include:
- Invisible reCAPTCHA where the system intelligently detects if the user is human in the background
- reCAPTCHA V2 where the user simply clicks an "I'm not a robot" checkbox
-
keyCAPTCHA where the user must complete a jigsaw puzzle
In our latest update, version 4.7, we’ve included yet another defense to block spam from seeing the light of day: hCaptcha
hCaptcha is one of the world's most widely used independent Captcha services.
We’re incorporating it in a few places where spammers can prepare their attacks.
Registering:
Prevent spammers from joining your community. If enabled, the hCaptcha will stop spammers in their tracks before even creating an account in your community.
Guest posts:
Community leaders have the option to allow guests to reply to topics. This could potentially open up the floodgates for spammers, but the hCaptcha effectively mitigates this by asking the entity (hopefully an actual person) to problem solve. If the sequence is not successfully completed, the guest post won't be published.
hCaptcha is available in the new 4.7 Beta 1 release.
Give it a shot and let us know what you think in the comments… just be sure to successfully select all the traffic lights if you’re a guest! 😉
