Add an extra level of security to your Skilljar training platform and protect against bot user sign-up with hCaptcha’s invisible captcha technology. When “sign up with Skilljar” is enabled on your domain, hCaptcha will identify if a new user is a real person or an automated bot when they attempt to create an account via the Skilljar student sign-up form.
- Note: The captcha validation is only available for accounts created via the Skilljar identity provider (IDP) and can’t be used with single sign-on (SSO). Please check your SSO IDP as it may already include its own captcha functionality.
hCaptcha is enabled by default for all new Skilljar Organizations after April 10th, 2023. If you are an existing customer before this date and would like to enable the feature, or a new customer and would like to remove it, please reach out to your customer success manager or Skilljar support, and we can add it to or remove it from your organization free of charge.
Read more about hCaptcha and its technology at the hCaptcha website.
What is hCaptcha?
hCaptcha is a security-focused “bot detection” captcha tool that identifies whether a user is a real person or an automated “bot” when they attempt to sign-up/create a new student account via your Skilljar sign-up page. If the user is suspected to be a bot or signing up for spam purposes, hCaptcha blocks the user's creation and reloads the sign-up page.
Using this captcha technology, hCaptcha adds additional security and helps protect against bot sign-up accounts via public or login-required training domains, without requiring any personal information from the user.
How hCaptcha works
If students are given the option to sign up to your training site via the Skilljar sign-up form, hCaptcha will run on the sign-up page and check if a student is a real person when they attempt to sign-up for a new account. When the new user selects “sign up” and the form is accepted, we make a call to the hCaptcha to run their validation tool to confirm this is not an automated user.
If the new user passes this automatic check, we’ll create a new student for your organization as usual. If the user is suspected to be a bot or script and fails the check, the sign-up page will reload and prevent the new account from being created.
If you want to display hCaptcha's terms and conditions for your learners, we have made this easy to insert into your sign-up page by adding the following code snippet into your Theme:
<!-- START Show HCaptcha Help Text -->
<style>
.hcaptcha-compliance-text {
display: block;
}
</style>
<!-- END Show HCaptcha Help Text -->
Example:
This site is protected by hCaptcha and its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
If you use the code snippet to show this text, you can customize the text in each of your language packs from your language pack settings in your Skilljar dashboard.
How to enable hCaptcha
hCaptcha is enabled by default for all new customers as of April 10th, 2023. If you are an existing customer before this date and would like to enable the feature, or would like to remove it from your organization, please reach out to your customer success manager or Skilljar support.
FAQ
I use SSO - can I take advantage of this feature?
No - hCaptcha validation is only available when creating an account via the Skilljar IDP on your Skilljar course platform. SSO is still the best way to protect access and enforce that the students are exactly who they say they are. Please check your SSO IDP as it may already include its own captcha functionality.
Can I turn it on for “some” students and some courses, and what about Bulk invites?
This can only be enabled or disabled at the organization level and only happens when students are created by self-sign-up. Any student who has been created via SSO, API, or via a bulk invite from the dashboard won’t experience this hCaptcha check, since their student account will already exist.
Does this capture PII for the Learners?
No - hCaptcha doesn’t require PII and it doesn’t pass any PII from Skilljar to hCaptcha during the validation process.
I have students who are unable to sign up for my domain - what should I do?
If you have students reporting that they’re unable to pass the browser validation and can’t sign up for the training domain, please reach out to Skilljar support or your customer success manager to disable this captcha technology for your organization.