Suggestion for feature, 'are you human?'

  • Hi Pascal,

    I’ve been using IQ for a while now and it’s working well. Thanks.

    My one problem is while I do need to block whole countries, there are legitimate users in those countries.

    If you ever had the time, a very cool optional feature would be an “are you human?” gateway when a block happens. In other words, if a real person in a blocked country tried to access website they’d see a challenge quiz or captcha. They could then answer correctly and be allowed to proceed to website. All the bots, on the other hand, would still be blocked.

    The reason I think of this is I do find that blocking a bunch of countries is essential for my website security and hosting bandwidth, due to my blog being extant for many years and thus on all the hacker’s lists as a ripe target. But on the other hand, I know I get false positives and end up blocking legit users.

    Thanks, MTN

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/iq-block-country/

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Pascal

    (@iqpascal)

    Hi,

    And would that same visitor next time he visits be allowed or not?

    Thread Starter mountainguy2

    (@mountainguy2)

    Hi Pascal,

    In my opinion, once the person was evaluated to be a real person, they would be allowed by IP, but it could be strict and invoked each time a real person tried to access.

    This feature would be optional of course, with a checkbox or other toggle.

    The reason I ask is that on my own website I use the Quiz plugin and it’s incredibly effective at blocking comment spam:

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/quiz/

    In my case, if I could block a country but have the error/blocked page show a quiz or captcha, then I could let in the real people who were motivated to access site and could answer my quiz correctly. Some would still be human spammers, but my other blocking systems would take care of them.

    There might be some redundancy to all this, but in the case of defense redundancy is good.

    In the case of a quiz, the question and answer need to be admin configurable.

    MTN

    Plugin Author Pascal

    (@iqpascal)

    I will think about it ??

    But you probably want to make this configurable for every country you want to block. As often people will want to block countries including the human visitors all together due to for instance license issues.

    Thread Starter mountainguy2

    (@mountainguy2)

    I’m not sure that as first step it would need to be specific to each country. Just something we could optionally invoke from the admin (toggle using a checkbox) so that a blocked user would see something like:

    “Your IP is blocked due to our country blocking system, please answer this challenge question and we’ll whitelist you: What planet do we live on?”

    The challenge question and answer would be admin configurable. As with the Quiz plugin I linked to above, the system should allow multiple answers configurable by the owner/admin of the website.

    If the challenge question is too complicated to code, a captcha would perhaps work but the criminals work hard to break the captchas. Customized challenge questions are better, in my experience. I’ve tried both.

    First let me say I have been using this plugin for about 4 months now and it is freaking awesome.

    I agree with mountainguy2 this feature would be perfect. I have several product manufacturers who are in other countries and occasionally they like to check up on how the site looks and if I am selling product way to cheap lol

    Cheers

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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