Feature announcement: introducing CAPTCHA anti-bot protection
If you're selling limited edition products, with a market value higher than the retail price, you're going to want anti-bot protection. So we've enabled CAPTCHA for all Standard, Plus, Professional and Enterprise CrowdHandler plans.
When CAPTCHA is switched on for a waiting room, your users will need to complete a quick challenge to get access to a waiting room position. They will also need to complete a CAPTCHA when the waiting room is in pre-sale countdown mode.
CrowdHandler uses Google reCAPTCHA
CrowdHandler waiting rooms use Google's reCAPTCHA V2, which presents the user with an "I'm not a robot" checkbox for them to click.
Then, it will either pass them immediately, or — if Google's analysis of cookies and canvas rendering suggests the page was being downloaded automatically — it will present the user with an image grid, something like the example here, and ask them to identify and match images.
How to enable and use CAPTCHA on your site
To enable CAPTCHA in your waiting rooms, you'll need to register a reCAPTCHA account with Google, get your keys, and enter the details in your CrowdHandler control panel.
Once you've registered and entered the keys into the admin panel, you can pick which waiting rooms on your account require a CAPTCHA, and these rooms can then operate in one of three modes:
Off — users won't need to complete a CAPTCHA
Over-rate — CAPTCHA is on, but users will only need to complete it when traffic to your room is exceeding the rate and the queue is starting to back up.
Always on — users will always need to complete a CAPTCHA to get access to whatever area of the site (URL pattern) your room is protecting. This means that, even if the traffic has not reached the level that would cause a waiting room to kick in, users will need to complete a CAPTCHA to access the target site.
Using a custom template? You'll need to update it
If you're using our standard template, you will see that it's already been updated to incorporate the support for CAPTCHA.
However, if you created a custom template before we launched this feature (in other words, if you downloaded and customised our standard template before we launched CAPTCHA support), you will need to update. To do this, download the standard template from the admin panel, find the new CAPTCHA tags, and add them to your custom template.
For more information and full instructions on how to incorporate and set up CAPTCHA for your waiting rooms, visit the Knowledge Base: Integrating Google reCAPTCHA
Anti-bot protection? We’ve got you
The introduction of CAPTCHA anti-bot protection for CrowdHandler's waiting rooms is just step one in our anti-bot, anti-fraud strategy. Stay tuned for more features, which we will be rolling out over coming months.