How do I make sure my website can block automation scripts, bots?

Question

I'd like to make sure that my website blocks automation tools like Selenium and QTP. Is there a way to do that ? What settings on a website is Selenium bound to fail with ?

Answer 1

With due consideration to the comments on the original question asking "why on earth would you do this?", you basically need to follow the same strategy that any site uses to verify that a user is actually human. Methods such as asking users to authenticate or enter text from images or the like will probably work, but this will likely have the effect of blocking google crawlers and everything else.

Doing anything based on user agent strings or anything like that is mostly useless. Those are trivial to fake.

Rate-limiting connections or similar might have limited effectiveness, but it seems like you're going to inadvertently block any web crawlers too.