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CAPTCHA FAQs



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Nova Dawn

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Jun 21, 2024


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24 comments

It is extremely rare that traffic from an actual human is misclassified as bot traffic by Cloudflare.

1. Can we see an image of what it will look like to a customer upon traffic misclassification? Are "Zendesk" and "CloudFlare" front and center in the messaging on that page?

2. Could you share some insight into how extremely rare defined? 1/100, 1/1000, or 1/100,000, or something else?

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Extremely rare? Our clients have been complaining about it for the past week. In addition, our internal staff is having to complete Captchas to access the administrative back end. How do we turn off this dysfunctional feature?

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If you are running a good bot and want to have it added to the Cloudflare allowlist (cf.bot_management.verified_bot), contact your vendor to submit a request.

We submitted this form and didn't get any response for 3 weeks now. Are you sure this form is the way to go?

We think it is Zendesk who has to configure cf.bot_management.verified_bot in their Cloudflare dashbpard.

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Does anybody else have the problem that due to this bot blocking thing, you cannot use SEO tools to crawl your Help Center anymore?

We always used 3rd party tools to check for broken links.

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Hi there,

Is it possible to force offering the CAPTCHA? We have had a massive spam attack from China a couple of weeks ago via one of our contact form from the help center.

The spam attack was obviously done by a bot which used random emails from Chinese hosts IPs.

We have disabled the form and cleaned up our Support (bulk delete spam and users), but we would like to be sure that this won't happen again before re-enabling the form.

Thank you.

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Hello, we are experiencing the same problem as Julien. We had 900 spam tickets during one months via one of our contact forms. Those emails come from Chinese email addresses, following a special pattern (numbers@ a Chinese email provider). We don’t want to disable the contact form, so at the moment, we can only mark them as spam. Thus, we also would like to know if a CAPTCHA can be forced.

Thank you!

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Dion

Zendesk Customer Care

Hello Martina, 

CAPTCHA is required when the setting "anyone can submit tickets" is enabled. You can check this article for more information: Managing End-Users. You can also block the domain of those senders by adding them to the blocklist. Please see this article for more information: Using the allowlist and blocklist to control access to Zendesk Support

Hope this helps!

Dion

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Ronan McHugh

Zendesk Employee

Hi Martina Ksink and Julien Maneyrol,

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I've created tickets to follow up on your issues.

Best regards,

Ronan

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Hi @...,

Thank you for following-up.

The problem has been mitigated by removing placeholders in the automated reply.
Still, being able to fine-tune CPACHA (enforce it under certain circumstances) would be really helpful and much more secure.

Best regards,

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Agree with David Bjorgen this doesn't seem to be rare as we've also had escalating issues with this for the last month across both staff and end users. We have also heard from one of our partners that this also impacted their Zendesk account. 

Also agree with Chain Bridge Developers we also requested a cloudflare exception, but there's no confirmation, nor guidance about how to configure the user agent string or feedback on why our app is getting blocked to give us confidence in a solution. 

It makes sense Zendesk has control over the configuration of Cloudflare rules, and a quick check found a fun unresolved conversation in the Cloudflare community with the same issue. 

We've embedded ZD Guide into our app, but the more our users access it, the more the captcha appears! Clearly our app is triggering cloudflare, even though we use a standard Chrome user agent. We also use the web widget so we cannot disable "anyone can submit tickets" to remove the compulsory captcha.

We feel stuck on a solution, so would love to hear from other users if they have found a solution / workaround. 

From the Zendesk product side:
A. Is there any opportunity to look at the Zendesk challenge solve rate to help minimise the impact to real humans?

B. Is there any work planned to isolate cloudflare captcha to certain scenarios? e.g.

1. submitting a ticket (enable captcha on the ticket if anyone is allowed to submit a ticket)

2. viewing Guide (disable captcha - allow anyone to view guide using a validated browser / user agent)

3. use web widget (disable captcha - allow anyone to view guide using a validated browser / user agent)

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We've been experiencing the same issue that many users have brought up over the last month. All last year when I was my team was working on cleaning up our Guide; we didn't see a captcha once, now today alone, I've seen it five times in the last 30 minutes.

This is making both our internal and external customers frustrated and throwing a wrench into my push to have our customers use self-service.

When can we expect a resolution to this, or is this something else that's going to remain unresolved for years?

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Hi Julien Maneyrol

We're seeing these spam tickets in Chinese as well. Can you clarify what you did to mitigate the issue? Did it permanently stop the spam?

Thank you

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Hi John Tieu,

I followed the instructions from this article: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408887368986 to remove placeholders that spammers target in our automatic replies.

Regards

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

Is Captcha also enabled for webwidget submitters or just Help Center form submitters?

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Nara

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Heather, at this time, Captcha is not available for the Web Widget in Zendesk. More information can be found towards the end of the Controlling Spam Tickets section in this article here.

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Hi, 

Is there a way to have a captcha all the time? 
At the moment whenever I test the Submit a request part, there is no Captcha. 
I do not care if it has some detecting function, I would like it on all the time. 
Thank you. 

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Noly Maron Unson

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Ferenc,

CAPTCHA has always been active and present hence it's been enabled by default and no further action is required. However, it's only running in the background and would only be visible if there's suspicious activity detected. At the moment, there is no option to always present the CAPTCHA for every time the end-user submits a request.

Hope this helps.

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Hi Noly, 
Not really. I can read the article and see this. But I want captcha to show all the time. Not just when zendesk served thinks there is a bot attack. 

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Noly Maron Unson

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Ferenc,

This is not possible at the moment. I've marked this as product feedback for review, which means that your input will be aggregated as a part of our Voice of the Customer program that provides customer feedback to our product development teams.

Thank you.

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Hello,

I understand that captcha is not yet implemented for Web Widget. I want to ask if you are planning to do this and if so what is the ETA?

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This is a major security risk to all companies involved. Captcha needs to be present on every portal that has the capability to submit a service request. I have seen other posts as well where tickets are being submitted with subjects in Chinese and it is using placeholders to create the randomized tickets. This is insanely annoying as we are getting at least 10 of these tickets a day. We shouldn't have to come up with a workaround in my opinion. Zendesk needs to be made more secure. We are already considering switching support platforms because of other issues, and I'm sure this will be one of the cons added to our list as we review the pros and cons of using Zendesk versus another platform. I hope there is a quick resolution to this issue as attacks are becoming more prevalent. 

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I'm jumping in with everyone else here recently to say that it would be beneficial for all to add the captcha option back onto the web forum. We get spam tickets from Chinese email addresses daily. They use different email addresses each time, and the email subject and bodies are all similar but different enough that creating triggers is difficult. Additionally, we do have users who are from China, so simply blacklisting the domain is out of the question. Simply implementing the ability to have a captcha on the web forum would solve all of these issues.

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hey theref, thank you so much for taking the time to provide us with your feedback here. I wanted to point you in the direction of our product feedback forum for Guide where we collect product feedback and where our PM’s review feedback from our customers. We would greatly appreciate you using this forum to share your feedback with us for better visibility. Here is our product feedback template to get you started. Thank you!

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Subscribing to this feature. 

Last 1-2 month(s), up to 10 “Chinese spams” are delivered to my ZenDesk every day. It's very annoying.

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