Protecting Your Surveys from Spam

Initial Considerations

REDCap introduced the Google reCAPTCHA feature to protect your public surveys from spam and abuse. This feature checks whether an actual human or a computer program is filling out your form.

REDCap public links, like any other website links, may be subject to 'bots', which are automated software programs that could enter junk data in online forms. A way to avoid this is by using the reCAPTCHA feature, which will check for bots. A 'captcha' is a test that is easy for humans to solve, but hard for bots to figure out. This test acts as a gateway to your survey that must be solved to proceed. This will block spam automated software while allowing your survey participants to start your survey with ease.
A survey participant will only need to pass the reCAPTCHA test once per day on a given device or computer.
If you utilize any kind of reward for completing your survey (like a gift card or monetary compensation), we strongly recommend you turn on this feature for your surveys.
Note: You will first need to have enabled the use of surveys in this project from the project setup page as well as enabled your first instrument to be used as a survey.

The Process

1. Navigate to your project in REDCap.
   
   
2. Select the "Survey Distribution Tools" link from the left-hand navigation.
   
   
3. Under the tab "Public Survey Link", you will select the checkbox marked "Protect the public survey using the Google reCAPTCHA feature".
   
   
   

What the Participant Sees

The reCAPTCHA looks like a landing page for the user.  Here they will just need to select a box confirming "I'm not a robot" and select "Begin survey".  

The reCAPTCHA is user friendly and easy to follow. Just a few minutes of your time activating reCAPTCHA could save you a lot of time trying to clean up survey spam

Additional Considerations

reCAPTCHA can only be used for public survey links, it cannot be enabled to populate when record-specific links are sent to participants.