Visual Captcha for Bot Protection

Category
Bot Protection
Published

Fight bot detection false positives by showing a visual captcha challenge

Until recently, the Bot Protection feature was entirely invisible to end-users. While effective in most cases, occasionally real users were being wrongly identified as bots (aka. false positives) and were therefore blocked from signing up to the application, without having a way to rectify the error. To overcome this issue, users would have to reach out via support channels for remediation.

Clerk now expands the functionality of Bot Protection by offering more control over the widget, allowing your end-users to overcome such situations on their own. There are now two Bot Protection widget types:

  1. Invisible: Render an invisible challenge if bot traffic is suspected. (This is what we had until now.)
  2. Smart: Render an interactive challenge if bot traffic is suspected. Suspected users will have to click to the widget in order to prove they're not a bot.

For instances that had previously enabled Bot Protection, your settings are automatically set to Invisible as this was the previous default. In the near future, all new instances will default to Smart.

To configure your Bot Protection settings, head to the Attack Protection section of Clerk Dashboard and read more about Bot Protection.