JTZL's Bot Maze vs SafeGuard Cloud Paywall – Bot Protection

JTZL’s Bot Maze protects your WordPress site from unwanted AI crawlers and scrapers by planting invisible trap links that only bots will follow. When a bot enters the trap maze, it gets lost in an ever-expanding maze of realistic-looking fake pages while it quietly builds a suspicion score based on its behavior. How it works: Trap link injection — Invisible links are added to your real pages. Legitimate visitors never see them, but bots following every link on the page will enter the trap maze. Lazy maze generation — Trap pages link to more trap pages, generated on demand. The deeper a bot goes, the more time it wastes. Bot scoring — Each trap page visit adds suspicion points. Deeper traversal earns bonus points. Once a threshold is reached, the visitor is flagged as a bot. Blocking and tarpitting — Flagged bots can be blocked outright (403), served decoy pages (light tarpit), or slowed down with a deliberate delay (full tarpit). Crawler verification — Known search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) are verified via reverse DNS and exempted from scoring. Features: Zero impact on legitimate visitors — trap links are hidden from humans and search engines Configurable injection method (content, footer, or both) Adjustable scoring thresholds and blocking behavior robots.txt integration to signal trap paths as disallowed Analytics dashboard showing bot activity, top IPs, and score distribution Blocked Bots detail page showing full user agent, score, visit history Optional comprehensive tracking mode to monitor blocked bot persistence Automatic log retention and maintenance via WP-Cron Privacy policy suggestion for GDPR compliance Geographic heat map of bot activity by country with two GeoIP provider options MaxMind GeoLite2 local database — all lookups on your server, GDPR-friendly (recommended) ip-api.com external API — simple setup, no license key required Lightweight — minimal footprint, geographic tracking is fully optional Third-Party Services This plugin offers optional geographic tracking with two provider options. No data is sent to any external service unless a site administrator explicitly enables one of these providers. MaxMind GeoLite2 (Recommended) When MaxMind GeoLite2 is selected as the GeoIP provider (Settings > Bot Maze > Geographic Tracking), the plugin downloads the GeoLite2-Country database from MaxMind and performs all IP-to-country lookups locally. No visitor data leaves your server. What is downloaded: The GeoLite2-Country database (~60 MB), updated weekly via WP-Cron. What is sent to MaxMind: Only your license key during database downloads. No visitor IP addresses are shared. Requires: A free MaxMind license key from maxmind.com/en/geolite2/signup. Service website: https://www.maxmind.com License: GeoLite2 databases are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Terms of service: https://www.maxmind.com/en/geolite2/eula ip-api.com When ip-api.com is selected as the GeoIP provider, the plugin sends visitor IP addresses to ip-api.com to resolve their country of origin. This data is used to display a geographic heat map of bot activity in the admin dashboard. What is sent: The visitor’s IP address only, over unencrypted HTTP. When it is sent: At the time a trap page visit is recorded, only while this provider is selected. Service website: http://ip-api.com Terms of service: https://ip-api.com/docs/legal Privacy policy: ip-api.com does not log queries from the free API endpoint. Note: The free tier only supports HTTP (not HTTPS). If your site must comply with GDPR, use the MaxMind local database option instead. Geographic tracking is off by default and requires explicit opt-in by a site administrator.

This plugin nominates which pages are encrypted and diplayed in such a way that they cannot be accessed by search engines, AI bots or any other type of web scraper. This plugin provides much better protection from search engines, AI bots and other web scapers by encrypting the pages so that browser user-agents cannot be spoofed. Only the ArtisBrowser can decrypt Safeguard Cloud pages and bots cannot use ArtisBrowser. Creates a most secure tunnel between web server and the user’s desktop. Simply tag pages to be protected by nominating keyword/s found in their url. Can be viewed on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android phones. ACCOUNT FEATURES An account on the Safeguard Cloud server provides: Online dashboard for page and access management. Limit access to Windows, Mac, iOS or Android phones. Settings can control user access per platform. Manage access for bots on a pay-per-view basis. Optional ACCESS RIGHTS using DRM tokens. Optional COPY PROTECTION from screenshots and recording. Optional WATERMARK using your own image. BOT MANAGEMENT (Optional) Allow access to bots by IP/network and user-agent. Manage periodic bot billing for pay-per-view. Set categories and tariff for bot usage. Bot login for account management. DRM MANAGEMENT (Optional) Assign DRM tokens with OS, expiry and device limitations. Allow access to users by device fingerprint or network. COPY PROTECTION (Optional) Safe from all copy including screenshots and recording. No view-source, download or save options. Note: This plugin connects to a third party service for cloud service provided by SafeGuard Media. To view protected pages, users are required to use a secure web browser known as ArtisBrowser For more information visit the SafeGuard Cloud website. Licensing This plugin is free to use but billing management requires a SafeGuard Cloud account.