I’ve gotten intermittent reports of Captcha failing and preventing form submissions. Anyone else experienced something similar? I can’t replicate so I can’t resolve…
There is an actual error message displayed. This is our product warranty claim form, so it’s becoming a serious issue. How can we troubleshoot this?
Hi @AGreening,
Thank you for reaching out to the Community!
First, I’d like to ask some questions to better understand what is happening:
- Is it a HubSpot form? Or an external form?
- Is the website hosted on HubSpot or externally?
- Does the form work on its own? Is the issue only happening when the form is on the page?
There may be conflicting scripts on the page, preventing it to work properly.
I found the reply from @himanshurauthan on this post “HubSpot Form can’t be submitted due to reCAPTCHA error” that might help you.
I also wanted to invite a couple of subject matter experts to this conversation @Franci, @danmoyle and @ChrisoKlepke do you have any suggestions to help @AGreening, please?
If anybody else has anything to add and/or share, please feel free to join in the conversation 
Thanks and have a great day!
Best,
Bérangère
It’s a HubSpot form embedded on our site here. As mentioned, I have not been able to replicate the issue, so for me the form works whether I’m viewing it directly or viewing the embedded form on the warranty claim page. My Customer Service team has indicated multiple times that users have encountered difficulties submitting the form, but I don’t receive detailed information to help troubleshoot.
Re: Himanshu’s suggestions, those don’t appear to be relevant…it is a HubSpot form, am I supposed to have a standalone API key (now private apps on HubSpot) for functionality that’s native to the form? There is nothing present in our account settings for reCAPTCHA. As user CBeirne indicates, clearing my own browser cache won’t resolve the issue for our users, and seems ineffective considering I have been unable to replicate on my own device.
Thanks for the tag @BérangèreL
Hi @AGreening. I’ve read a few comments in the last year or so that aren’t favorable to reCAPTCHA. It seems it’s not always the greatest. I’m wondering if it’s simply a matter of turning it off? Is there a reason your company wants it on forms?
I did find this resource that says “One of the most common reasons for reCAPTCHA to fail in Chrome is when the browser is out of date and suffering from bugs or incompatibilities that have been fixed in the latest version. You can easily search for and install any available updates. Click the three-dot menu at the top right of the Chrome window.” So while it’s not your browser, and it’s inefficient to ask each person to update their browser or clear their cookies, it may be that simple of an answer.
(Side note - for my job I see a lot of screen shares and it’s wild how many people’s Chrome browsers are out of date…)
So if that’s the case, turning of reCAPTCHA may be your best bet. I don’t know if there’s a better option for preventing spam, but that’s where I’d personally start.
Thanks for the reply Dan. We’re using reCAPTCHA for the same reason anyone else would…to reduce spam submissions. It seems to happen in waves, but we’ll receive a number of submissions where the submitted data doesn’t make any sense and is clearly coming from some kind of bot. As far as I can tell, reCAPTCHA is the ONLY tool HubSpot provides to address spam submissions on forms.
Our customers aren’t necessarily tech-savvy so tasks like updating a browser, deactivating plug-ins etc. are not simple, convenient solutions, and our Customer Service team can take the flak for it, whether it’s their fault or not. I wish more details were available from the error message, at least.
@AGreening instead of reCAPTCHA, I found this article that lists some other ideas for preventing spam, including this interesting one: “Employ a honeypot. Honeypots are traps designed to lure in and then eliminate bots, viruses, or other bad actors that you may encounter online. When it comes to form spam, a honeypot is a secret, hidden field that bots will automatically fill out when they try to submit a form. Because that form field is hidden from human visitors, your users won’t even know its there. But when the bot fills it out, that form submission will go straight to the trash.”
That seems prety simple to do in HubSpot, and build a list to clean up weekly, or even daily. Or with a workflow perhaps. Depending on how much spam you get, this seems like a better fit for your contacts.
How is the Captcha even supposed to work? We have it enabled on our forms, but it doesn’t require a user to click a box or anything. We receive tons of spam and international requests that should be prevented by using the Captcha, but I want to understand how it is supposed to behave. Is it just an image that is supposed to deter people? Shouldn’t it require something of the user?
