How do I remove bots and fake entries from my giveaway?

A bot attack can add thousands of fake entrants to a giveaway in a few hours. They inflate the public entrant and entry counters, which puts real customers off entering, and they use up your plan's monthly entrant allowance. Cleaning up takes three steps: stop new bot sign-ups, disqualify the bots, then delete them.

How do I stop new bot sign-ups?

Edit your giveaway, stay on the Giveaway tab and open Bot Protection. Then save the giveaway.

• Sign-ups from the same IP: set a maximum number of sign-ups per IP address within a number of minutes, for example 3 within 60. Leave it at 0 to turn it off.
• Sign-ups from the same Class B Subnet: the same limit for a whole network range (255.255.x.x). It catches bots that rotate addresses inside one provider.
• Block sign-ups from VPN and Servers: rejects entrants coming from data centers and VPNs, where most bot traffic comes from.
• Reject sign-ups if referral user is disqualified: stops a disqualified entrant from bringing in more fake friends through their referral link.

On paid plans you can also add reCAPTCHA. See how to add reCAPTCHA to your giveaway.

How do I disqualify bots in bulk?

Bot Advisor scans everyone who entered a giveaway and gives each entrant a risk score with a plain-English reason. It looks for many sign-ups from one IP or network, disposable email addresses, auto-generated names and emails, entries completed at machine speed, referral abuse and sudden sign-up bursts. Customers added by Shopify Auto Sign-up aren't evaluated.

1. In your Giveaways list, open the giveaway's menu and choose Bot Advisor.
2. Check the giveaway is selected, optionally limit the scan to a date range with From and To, and click Analyze.
3. Review the results: entrants are grouped as Genuine, Low Risk, Medium Risk and High Risk, with the detected patterns and the IP addresses shared by several entrants.
4. Disqualify the bots in the way that fits the attack:
   • Disqualify all high-risk flags every high-risk entrant in the list at once.
   • Disqualify all from this IP, next to a shared IP address, flags everyone who signed up from it, including entrants not shown in the report.
   • Tick entrants and click Disqualify selected for a hand-picked list.

Bot Advisor never removes anyone on its own. Its signals are advice, not proof, so look through the list before you disqualify. To disqualify or restore one entrant, go to Users, find them and click Disqualify or Restore. Filter the list by Disqualified to see everyone you've flagged.

What does disqualifying do, and what doesn't it do?

• It keeps them out of the draw. A disqualified entrant can never be picked as a winner.
• It can be undone. Restore them from Users at any time.
• They still count. Disqualified entrants stay in the giveaway's public entrant and entry totals and in your monthly entrant limit. To take them out of both, delete them.

How do I delete disqualified entrants and get my entrant allowance back?

1. Go to Settings > Tools and open Remove Disqualified Users. Bot Advisor also links to it, next to the bulk disqualify buttons.
2. Select the giveaway and click COUNT & PREVIEW.
3. Check the preview: how many entrants, entries and sales will be removed, the most common email domains, a sample of the entrants, and how much of your entrant allowance you'll get back. If some of them have an order attached, the preview warns you. Restore any real customer before you go on.
4. Click REMOVE, type DELETE to confirm, and keep the page open while the progress bar runs. Large clean-ups run in batches. You can click STOP AFTER THIS BATCH at any point, and your numbers stay correct for everything removed so far.

When it finishes, you get a notification with a summary of what was removed.

What happens when I delete disqualified entrants?

• They're deleted with their entries. Every entry they earned is removed too.
• The giveaway totals go down. The entrant, entry, sales and referral counts drop by what was removed, so the public counters show real participants only.
• Referral entries are taken back. If a bot joined through someone's referral link, the entries that person earned for it are removed.
• Your entrant allowance comes back. Entrants who signed up in your current billing period stop counting toward your monthly limit, and the Usage Quota box on your dashboard updates straight away. Entrants from an earlier period don't count toward this one anymore, so they free nothing.
• Locked entrants can be unlocked. If bots pushed you past your limit, real entrants who signed up after them may have been locked. They're unlocked, oldest first, as far as the freed allowance allows.
• Winners are safe. Only disqualified entrants are deleted. If everyone in the giveaway is disqualified, the removal is blocked so a giveaway is never emptied by mistake.

Deleting can't be undone. If you're unsure about someone, restore them from Users first and run the removal again later.