Richpanel – Customer Support Helpdesk & Chat vs Blackhole for Bad Bots

✨ Trap bad bots in a virtual black hole Important: Do NOT use this plugin on sites with caching. Learn more » 👾 Bye bye bad bots.. Bad bots are the worst. They do all sorts of nasty stuff and waste server resources. The Blackhole plugin helps to stop bad bots and save precious resources for legit visitors. 👾 How does it work? First the plugin adds a hidden trigger link to the footer of your pages. You then add a line to your robots.txt file that forbids all bots from following the hidden link. Bots that then ignore or disobey your robots rules will crawl the link and fall into the trap. Once trapped, bad bots are denied further access to your WordPress site. I call it the “one-strike” rule: bots have one chance to obey your site’s robots.txt rule. Failure to comply results in immediate banishment. The best part is that the Blackhole only affects bad bots: human users never see the hidden link, and good bots obey the robots rules in the first place. Win-win! 🙂 ✨ Add a blackhole trap to help stop bad bots Important: Do NOT use this plugin on sites with caching. Learn more » 👾 Features Easy to set up Squeaky clean code Focused and modular Lightweight, fast and flexible Built with the WordPress API Works with other security plugins Easy to reset the list of bad bots Easy to delete any bot from the list Regularly updated and “future proof” Blackhole link includes “nofollow” attribute Plugin options configurable via settings screen Works silently behind the scenes to protect your site Whitelists all major search engines to never block Focused on flexibility, performance, and security Email alerts with WHOIS lookup for blocked bots Complete inline documentation via the Help tab Provides setting to whitelist any IP addresses Customize the message displayed to bad bots 😉 One-click restore the plugin default options Does NOT use or require any .htaccess rules Blackhole for Bad Bots protects your site against bad bots, spammers, scrapers, scanners, and other automated threats. ✨ Not using WordPress? Check out the standalone PHP version of Blackhole! 👾 Whitelist By default, this plugin does NOT block any of the major search engines (user agents): AOL.com Baidu Bingbot/MSN DuckDuckGo Googlebot Teoma Yahoo! Yandex These search engines (and all of their myriad variations) are whitelisted via user agent. So are a bunch of other “useful” bots. They always are allowed full access to your site, even if they disobey your robots.txt rules. This list can be customized in the plugin settings. For a complete list of whitelisted bots, visit the Help tab in the plugin settings (under “Whitelist Settings”). ✨ Check out Blackhole Pro and level up with advanced features! 👾 Exclusive Pro Features Option to disable for logged-in users Threshold control (number of allowed hits) Custom email alerts Custom messages for blocked bots Custom redirect for blocked bots Custom blackhole trigger links Complete inline documentation Block bots based on user agent Block bots based on IP address Whitelist/allow bots by user agent Whitelist/allow bots by IP address Redirect whitelisted bots Set custom HTTP Status Code Full-featured Bad Bot Log with paging, sorting, and field search Manually add bad bots to the Bad Bot Log Geo/IP location lookups for each bad bot Logs number of blocked hits for each bot ..plus everything the free version can do and more. ✨ Learn more and get Blackhole Pro » 👾 Privacy User Data: This plugin automatically blocks bad bots. When bad bots fall into the trap, their IP address, user agent, and other request data are stored in the WP database. No other user data is collected by this plugin. At any time, the administrator may delete all saved data via the plugin settings. Services: This plugin does not connect to any third-party locations or services. Cookies: This plugin does not set any cookies. Credit: Header Image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech. Blackhole for Bad Bots is developed and maintained by Jeff Starr, 15-year WordPress developer and book author. 👾 Support development I develop and maintain this free plugin with love for the WordPress community. To show support, you can make a donation or purchase one of my books: The Tao of WordPress Digging into WordPress .htaccess made easy WordPress Themes In Depth Wizard’s SQL Recipes for WordPress And/or purchase one of my premium WordPress plugins: BBQ Pro – Blazing fast WordPress firewall Blackhole Pro – Automatically block bad bots Banhammer Pro – Monitor traffic and ban the bad guys GA Google Analytics Pro – Connect WordPress to Google Analytics Head Meta Pro – Ultimate Meta Tags for WordPress REST Pro Tools – Awesome tools for managing the WP REST API Simple Ajax Chat Pro – Unlimited chat rooms USP Pro – Unlimited front-end forms Links, tweets and likes also appreciated. Thank you! 🙂

Today’s ecommerce support system is scattered across email, live chat, ticketing, FAQs, return centre and whatnot. Ricpanel allows you to streamline your complete customer service operation with three solutions in one platform. THREE CUSTOMER SUPPORT SOLUTIONS IN ONE PLATFORM 👉 Omnichannel Helpdesk & Ticketing 👉 Integrated Ecommerce Self-service 👉 Modern Live Chat & Messaging Video walkthrough 6 REASONS YOU SHOULD SWITCH TO RICHPANEL 1. Manage all support channels from one collaborative inbox Customers can contact you on their favourite channel – Live Chat, Email, Facebook & Whatsapp. You can manage all the support tickets from a single collaborative inbox. 2. Complete customer profile with WooCommerce integration Richpanel pulls in data from your WooCommerce store with seamless integration. Agents can view customer’s order details, website activities and they can use the data in responses and macros. They have all the context to assist customer queries quickly and at scale. 3. Eliminate repetitive contacts with ecommerce self-service. 30-35% of ecommerce support requests are repetitive. Richpanel lets you create guided self-service workflows to automate these common support scenarios. Customers submit all the information related to the issue in one go. Support agents can resolve the issue instantly without prolonged back and forth communication. 4. Convert more leads with a modern live chat on your store Built for support team all sizes, Richpanel helpdesk has all the tools to help you easily collaborate across your support team and different business functions to shorten the resolution time. Create unlimited users and teams as per your need. 5. Resolve customer issues instantly with power tools and shortcuts Use Power Reply to combine multiple actions; responses, assignments and order operations in one shortcut to resolve such queries with a single tap of the key. Use shortcuts to perform the most frequent helpdesk tasks in a jiffy. 6. Access all the support analytics and KPIs you need See how agents are performing at customer feedback & response times and assisting conversions. Richpanel also measures what agents are influencing sales and creating long term customer relationships. Filter reports by tags, channel (live chat, email, social) & agents. HOW TO GET STARTED Want to learn how you can power up your WooCommerce store support with Richpanel? Book a demo here or Sign-up here to see it in action.