For those who aren’t aware, around December of 2016, a scamming method arose which has been around for some time now. Basically, it tries making the user test to see how much they can click within a set amount of time The whole goal of it is to make them spam-click and get them to purchase something. Ideally, this would only work if the user actually has anything to begin with, but nothing has been done to prevent this sort of issue. You can see a demo of it here.
Now, I had attempted to come up with some fixes for this. One of them being that you had to click a check-box to allow you to confirm your purchase, but they had to wait a couple of seconds after clicking it – basically a captcha. However, some developers claimed that it would be a nuisance and would decrease their purchase rate. The idea of having a couple second wait before the button was enabled seemed to be the most popular, so I created two methods based on those ideas. You can see it here.
In fact, I made it a module script so other people could test it out for themselves. It’s open source and the module can be found here or on my GitHub repository. Hopefully this issue could be resolved.
The delay before enabling the button would hinder impulse purchases as well. Instead of disabling the button whenever the prompt opens – through brute force – tackle the problem cleverly e.g. only disable it when the user has their mouse in the area the button will appear.
In the area of what though? If their mouse is there already and they’re constantly clicking, it’s pretty much going to be enabled. Unless I’m not seeing what you mean.
If the mouse is in the general area of the “purchase” button when the prompt comes up, the button will be disabled at first, and the user should first have to mouse their mouse away from it before it is enabled (or after a few seconds have passed). If the mouse is nowhere near the purchase button, the button is just enabled by default. That way, clicking the button is ensured to be a conscious action.
Honestly I think this is just an opportunity to potentially make user experience worse. You can put effort into solving the issue but scam games will just resort to other ways of scamming. I think the best solution for this scam is the same solution for all other methods of scamming and phishing places; report the place.
