Alert: Please double-check your CiviCRM forms
If you're using Google's "I'm not a robot" reCAPTCHA on your CiviCRM forms, you might want to give them a test drive.
In the past few days, several sites have reported that the reCAPTCHA always fails. That means nobody can complete the form. Instead they get this failure message:
Please correct the following errors in the form fields below:
Please go back and complete the CAPTCHA at the bottom of this form.
Yuck.
Fortunately, this doesn't affect sites which are:
Using the very latest CiviCRM version, because version 5.77.0 (released today), fixes this problem.
Using the Form Protection extension, which already avoids this issue.
Is this a bug in CiviCRM?
Not really. It seems that Google recently changed something on their side, and CiviCRM just had to catch up.
Does this affect your site?
You can find out very easily like so:
First, be sure you're logged out of your site.
Next, visit a contribution page or event registration form that shows the “I'm not a robot” checkbox.
Submit the form just as any of your site visitors would, of course being sure to check “I'm not a robot.“
If the form submits without the error message I mentioned above, you're fine. If you see that error message though, you’ll want to take some steps to fix it.
How can you address this problem?
Any of these fixes will do:
Upgrade to the newest CiviCRM version, 5.77.0. (or, if you're part of the ESR program, take the latest ESR update, which also fixes this issue.)
OR: install and configure the Form Protection extension, which side-steps this problem in its own way.
If you don't like those options, you can have a developer patch your current CiviCRM version with the code fix, which is here.
Here's the thing:
Anti-bot-spam measures such as reCAPTCHA are valuable and important, but obviously you don't want them blocking everybody, which is what’s happened here.
Any active web-driven software package can encounter incompatibilities like this one. CiviCRM is no different.
What's great, though, is that CiviCRM came out with a fix for this within a matter of days.
That's one thing I love about open source software, and about the CiviCRM community in particular. Nothing is ever perfect, but CiviCRM is pretty darn good.
All the best,
A.