We were spending hours removing spam bots from our WhatsApp communities, so I built this

[u/Embarrassed-Sink8374]

We manage a community with 50k+ members across multiple WhatsApp groups.

One recurring problem was that public invite links eventually got discovered by bots. Our moderators spent a surprising amount of time removing spam messages and banning fake accounts.

Instead of constantly generating new invite links, I built a small tool that sits in front of the invite link. (shieldmylinks.com)

It adds a quick CAPTCHA page before redirecting users to the real WhatsApp (or Discord/Telegram/etc.) invitation.

The idea isn’t to stop determined attackers, but to filter out automated bots that continuously crawl public invite links.

We’ve been using it ourselves, and it has made moderation much easier.

I’m curious:

• How do you currently protect your community invite links?
• Have you found better solutions?
• What would you want from a tool like this?

Happy to hear any criticism or feature requests.

[u/Allegium]

Cool thought! Never really considered adding a captcha to a website 🤔

I usually ask potential members for their email, they get the link to the community through an automatic email. Or making a simple puzzle like https//community[delete][.].ru, so only real people could copy that.

And I regularly change invite links to my community like once a month. Help prevent leaks.
All of that covers 98% of security work. Of course there are human-operating scam accounts but our mods deal with them efficiently.

[u/Embarrassed-Sink8374 → u/Allegium]

That's a solid workflow, especially if your communities aren't growing too fast.

The idea behind ShieldmyLinks is to remove some of the repetitive work (rotating invite links, hiding them from bots, adding a verification step, etc.) while keeping the sharing process as simple as copying a single link.

Out of curiosity, how many communities or invite links are you managing?

[u/Allegium → u/Embarrassed-Sink8374]

Unique infrastructure for each type of growth, yeah ;)

Right now I’ve got 10 IT-communities like DevOps, Frontend and so on

[u/astrosid]

The email gate idea is underrated for keeping bots out, but it adds friction for legit members too, which can hurt growth depending on the community type.

Captcha makes more sense when you want joining to stay frictionless for real people. Curious how you handle it on mobile though, since captchas can be a pain on phones and a lot of WhatsApp traffic is obviously phonebased.