Update Appreciated | Bot vs Human Recognition

  • Resolved jetxpert

    (@jetxpert)


    3 years, 5 months ago

    Good Day!

    We searched through your forum and only found one topic that relates to ours.

    Specifically, we can confirm many “humans” visiting our website are being labeled as “bots.” Perhaps the opposite is happening as well.

    What can we do to improve these “false positives” or labeling?

    We have adjusted our Rate Limiting rules as recommended by Wordfence with no known improvements in your plugin’s bot vs human recognition capabilities.

    Everything else is working perfect.

    Thank you!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @jetxpert,

    Wordfence uses various methods to detect if a visit should be classified as a bot or human. One of these methods includes a large list of IP blocklists, and another is detecting for human-like activity on your site with Javascript. However, these can identify a human as a bot if Javascript is off in the visitor’s browser (or script errors/conflicts/local settings are causing this not to load properly), or share part of a blocked IP range.

    You could potentially show me an example of Live Traffic entries for one or a few of these visits detecting humans as bots so I can take a look for the IP(s) cropping up in lists and databases. You can censor any information you don’t wish to make public such as the visited page URL by editing any screenshots or removing that from text you copy/paste.

    Thanks,

    Peter.

    Thread Starter jetxpert

    (@jetxpert)

    Hi @wfpeter,

    We appreciate your reply and shedding more info on our reported issue.

    Below please find two classical examples confirming your Live Traffic engine may need to be updated to reflect more accurate information.

    Confirmed “Bot” reported as “Human”: https://ibb.co/8d7LJzW
    Confirmed “Human” reported as “Bot”: https://ibb.co/7GpSrLj

    Also, we need to ask: How does Live Traffic handle bots and visitors when a VPN or a browser in Private Mode is used? Is Live Traffic still capable of detecting the right type of visitor?

    Hope this helps.

    Thank you!

    ———————

    Confirmed “Bot” reported as “Human”:

    wf-live-traffic-bot-reported-as-human

    Confirmed “Human” reported as “Bot”:

    wf-live-traffic-human-reported-as-bot

    Plugin Support wfpeter

    (@wfpeter)

    Hi @jetxpert, thanks for your response.

    Human Vs. Bot detection ends up being fairly perfomance-intensive when run on the website itself and not critical to Wordfence’s use case. We want to know if bots/humans are behaving in a malicious manner, but just being a bot rather than a human isn’t something worth blocking in itself. This is why we don’t block bots outright by default and haven’t prioritized this feature from a development perspective.

    The Live Traffic page is intended to show security-relevant information and not be a fully-fledged analytics platform. We do recommend finding alternate solutions for the kind of in-depth, “who is visiting my site” type questions whether that’s a plugin or included scripts from another analytics provider.

    Thanks again,

    Peter.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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