Differentiating between human click and bot/script click

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Hi, Dear Friends!

I have created a scenario that picks up via a webhook when a user clicks on a link in an email that I have sent. The link captures his email address and forwards it to the webhook. The problem is that when I have sent out many of these emails that they get “clicked” by machines and not by humans which causes my webhook to be bombarded with false data.

So we have to find a way of discerning whether a human clicked the link or whether a script clicked the link. The only solution I’ve thought of is inserting a captcha between the clicking of the link and the forwarding information to the webhook. Is there anybody who has an idea how to do this?

The whole point of the scenario is to help the user by only clicking a link to sign up for my newsletter because if I send him to a landing page to fill out a form, I’m afraid that he will not actually do it knowing how lazy people are today. So I want to keep this a one click or two click solution.
All ideas are very appreciated.

Thank you, and have a good day!

Susan Flamingo

3

Welcome to the Make community!

You can’t do it reliably, especially not without making it more difficult for human users.

Captchas can be easily solved by bots, and is not as effective as you think.

One way to stop bots is perhaps implementing a payment system, even $0.10 will do.

Hope this helps! Let me know if there are any further questions or issues.

— @samliew

P.S.: Did you know, the concepts of about 70% of questions asked on this forum are already covered in the Make Academy. Investing some effort into it will save you lots of time and frustration using Make later!

4

Hmm… maybe have the scenario compare the time the email is sent against when the link was clicked? I would assume it might take a human some time to get notified of an email and then they themselves actually clicking it, while if it was botted it’s usually instantaneous.

5

What an ingenious idea! But it sparked an easy solution in my mind:
All those clicks happened seconds after the emails were sent, So I could just start the scenario 20 minutes or whatever after the email was sent and while I might lose a few authentic clicks at least most of them would be real.

Thank you so much.

  • SF
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