What Is The silentCAPTCHA Bot Minimum Score Option And How Does It Work?

The silentCAPTCHA Bot Minimum Score option is a part of the Bots & IPs Zone: silentCAPTCHA AntiBot system. You can use it to set the bot minimum score (percentage).

Bot Minimum Score configuration

To configure silentCAPTCHA Bot Minimum Score in Shield, you may go to the Shield main sidebar menu > Configure > Bots and IPs > silentCAPTCHA. Here, you'll see all options for the silentCAPTCHA AntiBot technology, including silentCAPTCHA Bot Minimum Score.

Access to silentCAPTCHA Bot Minimum Score option

Every IP address accessing your site gets its own unique visitor score - the higher the score, the better the visitor i.e. the more likely it's human.

A score of '0' would mean it's almost certainly good - likely a human.
Example: Score '0' - likely a human

A score of '100' means it's highly likely to be a bad bot.

Example: Score '100' - likely a bad bot

When a bot tries to login, or post a comment, we test its visitor score. If the visitor score fails to meet your minimum bot score, we prevent the request. If its higher, we allow it.

This means: choose a higher minimum score to be more strict and capture more bots (but potentially block someone that appears to be a bot, but isn't). Or choose a lower minimum score to perhaps allow through more bots (but reduce the chances of accidentally blocking legitimate visitors).

How to reset IP Reputation Score

If you need to reset IP Reputation Score for a specific IP address, the easiest way is via the IP Analysis dialog.

In the table, click the IP address you want.

When the Investigate IP dialog opens, choose Local Reputation > Reset option. Offense limit and bot signals will reset to zero.

Reset IP Local Reputation score

silentCAPTCHA Bot detection scoring improvements

ShieldPRO‘s new silentCAPTCHA system has been a great success so far with its ability to detect bad bots without any CAPTCHAs. As with anything new, there will always be room for enhancement, tweaking and optimising to ensure it works better on more sites.
Some of improvements we’ve made include:

  • Improved Bot Scoring Logic

    We’ve adjusted a lot of scoring logic to help ensure legitimate users don’t get flagged as bots.

    We've also improved the system's ability to pick up on past user sessions, which helps improve silentCAPTCHA scores for administrators.

  • silentCAPTCHA Cookie

    silentCAPTCHA uses a small cookie, icwp-wpsf-notbot, to track which visitors have completed the silentCAPTCHA checks.

  • Faster silentCAPTCHA JS Execution

    Originally, we thought loading the silentCAPTCHA JS in the page footer, after the page had loaded, was a wise optimisation. In fact, it belongs in the page header. The code is a small AJAX request that runs in the background and doesn't block page rendering for visitors. With the script in the footer, an admin would sometimes try to log in before the silentCAPTCHA JS had run, and would appear to be a bot. To fix this, the silentCAPTCHA JS now loads in the page's head section and runs immediately.

  • Better Bot Score Reset

    Sometimes it was necessary to reset a bot score through the Shield interface. Previously, when you reset the score it would immediately look to the Block List and pick-up negative signals for the IP and you’d be back to square 1. Not any longer – when you reset the bot score, it’ll also remove the IP from the Block List if it’s there.

Note: You can use the IP Management and Analyse tool to see all information pertaining to an IP address in 1 place. Here, you can also reset Bot Score for that IP address.