I was chatting with my sister last weekend. As a hobby, she creates and sells wedding invitation and other designs at an online marketplace site called Zazzle. She was telling me all about how that site implemented some automatic bot detection and it sounded like it was a total disaster. Real content creators were getting wrongly flagged as bots and then getting blocked from using the site just for using the most fundamental site functionality, and to make it worse, then it was apparently impossible for them to get past the captcha challenge or whatever it showed next. She forwarded me a link to some support forum discussion about it and it was mindboggling the troubles that some of the content creators there had to go through:
My sister said that her sales figures are way down compared to what they used to be and she didn't know if this bot flagger was disrupting real paying customers too. She said it had flagged her a couple of times, although she was luckily able to get past the bot challenge. She has pretty much given up on making and uploading new designs because of what was happening to other content creators there. She's now scared to use the site because she doesn't want to get wrongly locked out of her account.
https://community.zazzle.com/t5/technical-issues/bot-test-wo...
My sister said that her sales figures are way down compared to what they used to be and she didn't know if this bot flagger was disrupting real paying customers too. She said it had flagged her a couple of times, although she was luckily able to get past the bot challenge. She has pretty much given up on making and uploading new designs because of what was happening to other content creators there. She's now scared to use the site because she doesn't want to get wrongly locked out of her account.