Prevent Bot on Forms & Surveys

Bots are common on the web, and many of them exist to scrape data or send spam. To protect our users, we built a Bot Prevention feature that keeps malicious bots and automated activity out of your forms and surveys. It also improves the quality and accuracy of your survey data, cuts down invalid or duplicate responses, protects user data, and stops survey abuse.

What is bot prevention?

Bot prevention is the set of methods used to identify automated software, known as bots, and stop it from accessing or interacting with a website or application. It watches how a user interacts with a page, including how long they take to complete a task, how the mouse moves, and how they navigate between pages, and it uses those signals to identify and block bots, helping to prevent duplicate submissions and other automated abuse.

Bot Prevention gives users more security against malicious bots. It stops bots from accessing and manipulating user accounts, which keeps your surveys secure. Users are better protected against attacks, and their accounts stay secure. The feature also gives you more control over the experience on your survey. Protecting your respondents from bots matters, since those bots can steal data or create spam.

Prevent bot submissions in forms and surveys

BlockSurvey's Bot Prevention feature runs on Cloudflare's Turnstile, an invisible alternative to the usual CAPTCHA. It gives the browser challenges that run behind the scenes and look for signals that a human is using it. Instead of asking users to solve a puzzle or type a string of characters, invisible CAPTCHA uses machine learning to analyze user behavior and decide whether the visitor is a human or a bot. Users do not have to complete any extra steps to prove they are human.

With Bot Prevention, you can detect and block bots on your survey, which adds security and peace of mind. The feature relies on algorithms that detect and block bots without getting in the way of real users. It protects your data and helps you avoid the problems that malicious bots cause.

What is bot prevention used for in forms and surveys?

• Stopping bots and automated programs from submitting responses
• Confirming that responses come from real people, not bots or other automated programs.
• Checking that the person taking the form or survey is paying attention and not just clicking randomly through the questions.
• Reducing the number of invalid or duplicate responses by keeping bots from submitting.
• Improving the quality and accuracy of your survey data by making sure responses come from real people.
• Protecting user data and preventing data breaches by verifying that users are human.

What are the advantages of bot prevention?

• Improved data quality: Keeping bots from submitting responses improves the overall quality and accuracy of your survey data.
• Reduced invalid or duplicate responses: Bot prevention lowers the number of invalid or duplicate responses in the survey, which makes the survey process more efficient.
• Protection of user data: Bot prevention protects user data by making sure only real people can submit responses.
• Protection from automated attacks: Bot prevention helps protect websites and other platforms from automated attacks and scraping, which can slow performance and compromise user data.
• Reduced survey abuse: Bot prevention also helps stop survey abuse, such as people trying to complete the survey multiple times or using scripts to run through it faster.
• Better representation of the population: By keeping bots and automated programs from submitting responses, bot prevention helps make sure the results better represent the population you are surveying.

Best practices for using bot prevention

• Monitor the results: Watch the survey results for suspicious or abnormal patterns in the data, such as a large number of identical responses.
• Test the tool: Test the invisible bot prevention tool to make sure it works as intended and does not block legitimate human users.
• Make sure the tool is accessible: Use accessible bot prevention measures that people with disabilities can complete.
• Collect feedback: Gather feedback from participants about the survey and use it to improve future distributions.

How to set bot prevention in BlockSurvey

Note: we recently made bot prevention the default for every BlockSurvey you create, so you no longer have to set it up yourself. 

Step 1

Once you have created the BlockSurvey, go to "Settings".

Step 2

Find "Prevent Bot Detection" under the General section. Enable bot prevention to protect your forms and surveys from malicious bots or automated activity.

Conclusion

Bot prevention matters for online forms and surveys because it keeps responses coming from real people instead of bots or other automated programs. Pair it with social media gating to add another layer of security, so only legitimate users take part while your data stays protected. Data security is a priority for us, and Bot Prevention is one of the steps we take to protect it. Turn it on and your respondents' data stays safe.