A florist adds a spam filter to the order form on their website. On Friday afternoon a customer orders flowers for their mum's birthday, adds a note with a link to a photo, and pays. The filter decides the order looks like spam and quietly drops it.
On Saturday the customer rings, upset that nothing arrived. The florist has no order to look for. They lose the sale, give a refund, and the customer tells their friends.
Most of the time, nobody even rings
A plumber's quote form blocks a request from someone with a burst pipe. The person waits ten minutes, hears nothing, and calls the next plumber they find. The plumber never knows the job existed.
That's the real cost of a filter that blocks people. It doesn't show up as an error. It shows up as a quiet week.
What went wrong
In both cases the filter didn't look at what the visitor actually did. It reacted to something that only looked unusual: a link in a message, a visitor it hadn't seen before, a busy afternoon. It decided that unfamiliar means spam.
Being new or unknown is never a reason to block someone.
A missed bot costs far less
A spam bot that slips through means one junk message to delete, or a few pages copied. It's annoying, but it can be seen and it can be fixed. A blocked customer can't be seen, and they rarely come back.
How Rabbitproof decides
Rabbitproof looks at the whole visit, not just one address, and never at who the person is. A visitor is blocked when something about the visit doesn't add up, or when that device has been caught before. A visitor who looks normal is treated as a person, even if a few of them turn out to be bots. That's the trade it makes on purpose.
And when it gets one wrong
- Log only shows what would be blocked before anything is.
- Every block is listed on Requests with its reason.
- Unblock lets a real person back in with one click.
- On WordPress, a blocked message is kept so it can still be read.
No filter is perfect. What matters is that a mistake is visible and easy to undo, before it costs a customer.
Filter spam bots without losing customers
Rabbitproof filters spam bots and bot traffic on WordPress and any other website.
RabbitproofBot and spam protection for small websites.
