Many website owners face this choice. May I challenge a visitor to prove they are not a bot?

When you challenge you use CAPTCHAs, puzzles, quizzes, and math questions. I have always believed that it’s not ethically good to challenge visitors on your website. Doing so wastes the visitor’s time, and it’s just rude behavior as a host for client. You do not trust a visitor, which is not bad. Instead of investing for clearance on your side, you ask your visitor (customer) to do this job for you! Is this strategy ‘client oriented’? I don’t think so.

That’s why personal opinion – A customer, client oriented website owner must not challenge a visitor. The website must handle bot filtration by itself. And yes, a CAPTCHA or challenge for a site visitor is the ethic problem!

On the market we have Google reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, and CloudFlare Turnstile that challenge visitors. We have Akismet and CleanTalk. They do not challenge; instead, they perform background scoring. They use a global network to detect spam activity, which is part of the background scoring. Also, I’ve posted details why CleanTalk is an reCAPTCHA alternative. Many years ago, Mollom was an anti-spam cloud service for Drupal sites. It used to offer a background scoring service as well. However, the service was canceled somewhere between 2016 and 2018.

What do you think is ethically right or not to challenge website visitors in order to prove their humanity? Drop a comment in the section down below.