Captcha invisible not working occasionally

Hello Tuan,

I get repeatedly the feedback that after filling out the registration form users get the error message "please fill out invisible captcha". The error appears to show up quite random. Yesterday evening I could not register without turning off "enable captcha" in events booking configuration. Reactivated it today, to reproduce the problem - no problem showed up, I was not able to reporoduce it.

Setup: Joomla 5.1.0, Events booking 4.9.0, Google Recaptcha v2 invisible properly configured via plugin and setup in joomla global config.

Are there known problems (there are some posts in the forum, but not sure if they apply here, as well)? Any ideas how to track this down?

Best regards,

Sascha

Hi Sascha

It's up to Google Recaptcha to handle the validation. So in this case, honestly, it is out of our control. Recaptcha is not really reliable, and that's why Joomla removed it in Joomla 5.

So you can turn that captcha off or maybe find a different captcha plugin to use

Regards,

Tuan

Hello Tuan,

in terms of reliability I understand, that captchas are not a 100% solution and can be worked around. This apllies to all captcha solutions more or less. Whatsoever, I would expect the events booking integration to work properly. We also use Convert forms which supports also Google Recaptcha V3 and I see no issues, so far. In the linked post you mentioned working on some own integration. Is this still on your roadmap?

joomdonation.com/forum/events-booking-ge...-booking.html#164948

Further, I did not find any evidence in the joomla community stating that the unreliability of google captcha is the background for the decision removing visible captchas from joomla (invisible still available?!). Is there any roadmap for captchas in th joomla community you are aware of?

Best regards,

Sascha

Hi Sascha

Whatsoever, I would expect the events booking integration to work properly

That's not up to Events Booking, but it is the captcha plugin itself. Events Booking just uses Joomla API to render and validate captcha, it's up to the captcha plugin itself to do the rest. And I think the invisible recaptcha plugin is not using captcha version 3 API

I did not find any evidence in the joomla community stating that the unreliability of google captcha is the background for the decision removing visible captchas from joomla

From what I heard, that team decided that it is useless (captcha is so smart these days, so the captcha plugins can really blocks stupid bots)

In the linked post you mentioned working on some own integration

You can try joomdonation.com/joomla-extensions/jd-captcha.html . But from what I see (I used it here as well from the logs, I used it for our website), it cannot blocks all the bots. For stupid bots, it is blocked completely. But there are some bots, they are so smarts, they can read the captcha image and fill-in the right value, they can ignore honeypot field, and spams still happens. There is no way for us to block spams completely

Tuan