It's not hard to make a 70% effective bot blocker. It's extremely hard to make a 95%+ effective bot blocker without having a large number of false positives.
It is (probably) impossible to make a 99%+ effective bot blocker without having a very large number of false positives.
I've been working on this (and abusive user blocking) for a long time now and I'm roughly where you are, I have a product, it could be launched but I'm very wary of launching a half baked product that would eventually end up being disabled. I've had the help of a friendly corporate entity that gave me millions of datapoints to play with allowing me to look into their kitchen both on the support end and on the incoming traffic end as well as verified abusers.
This identified various fraud such as ad click fraud, affiliate scams, repeated harassment by the same users under different names, spam of all kinds and so on. It's been working there for more than 4 months on a fairly high level of confidence. And yet, I'm still wary of rolling it out on a larger scale.
Comments
It's not hard to make a 70% effective bot blocker. It's extremely hard to make a 95%+ effective bot blocker without having a large number of false positives.
It is (probably) impossible to make a 99%+ effective bot blocker without having a very large number of false positives.
I've been working on this (and abusive user blocking) for a long time now and I'm roughly where you are, I have a product, it could be launched but I'm very wary of launching a half baked product that would eventually end up being disabled. I've had the help of a friendly corporate entity that gave me millions of datapoints to play with allowing me to look into their kitchen both on the support end and on the incoming traffic end as well as verified abusers.
This identified various fraud such as ad click fraud, affiliate scams, repeated harassment by the same users under different names, spam of all kinds and so on. It's been working there for more than 4 months on a fairly high level of confidence. And yet, I'm still wary of rolling it out on a larger scale.