AntiBot: What is the High Reputation Bypass option and how does it work?
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.
Visitors that have accumulated a high IP reputation and AntiBot score should ideally never be blocked. But, this can happen sometimes. To prevent this, we added a new option: High Reputation Bypass.
This option is a part of the AntiBot Detection Engine (ADE). It prevents visitors with a high reputation scores from being blocked by Shield.
You can think of it like: Shield will see everything your IP does, and it’ll mark offenses against it. Once the IP has accumulated enough offenses and it’s about to block your IP address, it’ll lookup your Bot Reputation Score and if it’s high enough, you wont be blocked.
How does the High Reputation Bypass work?
To answer this questions, best is to use examples...
Example 1: High reputation - not blocked by Shield
Settings:
- AntiBot min score: 45
- High Reputation Bypass: 60
The Offense Limit is set to 3.
Visitor has failed to login, triggering the offense. Normally, when they reach the offense limit 3, they'll get blocked by Shield. But, if over that time their IP reputation is good enough, Shield wont block them.
So, if you set the reputation bypass to 60, visitor that gets reputation score higher than 60, they'll not get blocked. Shield will not consider this visitor being a bot.
Total reputation score for a particular IP can be seen under the IP Analysis section. In this example, visitor's reputation is 160, which is higher than 60 (set):
Example 2: Low reputation - blocked by Shield
Settings:
- AntiBot min score: 95
- High Reputation Bypass: 200
- Offense Limit: 3
In this example, visitor triggered the Shield offenses x3 times and get blocked.
The reason why this happens is because their reputation score was -20, which means lower than set (200). It's probably a bot (100%):
You can see the all details in your activity log: