Community works: reCAPTCHA problems fixed

A few of my clients have been having problems with Google reCAPTCHA in the past couple of months.

Apparently Google has changed reCAPTCHA so that it's more strict — which is nice if you absolutely never want a bot on your site, but not so nice if you absolutely want every real person to have an easy time giving you money.

Unfortunately, there are no settings to make it more strict or less strict. It just is what it is, "you get what you get", and all that. This means the only option is either to use it or not use it.

Well, that was true. Until now.

Others in the CiviCRM community noticed this problem as well, and someone out there created a fix, just today, actually.

The Form Protection extension will, in its next release, offer setting to adjust the sensitivity of the Google recaptcha checks.

So if you're getting too many legitimate users being treated as bots, you can make it less strict to compensate.

Likewise, if you're getting too many bots being allowed through as legitimate users, you can make it more strict.

Here's why this is cool:

My clients noticed this problem and had no way to deal with it. They could have paid me to implement a fix, but instead they decided to just disable Google reCAPTCHA for now, and take the “wait and see” approach.

Meanwhile, someone else in the community came up with a fix — at no cost to my clients.

And here's the bigger point:

Sometimes you experience a problem, and it's urgent enough that you're willing to pay to fix it.

But sometimes, somebody else takes care of it, so you don't have to.

That's part of the beauty of open-source software like CiviCRM.

We're all working together. We all help each other. We all benefit.

Not too shabby, right?

All the best,
A.