Only sends form on every second try, gives orange border on first

  • Hi everyone.

    After (probably) working fine for some time, a contact form on our page kind of stopped working.
    On first try of form sending, it gives the orange border error (= spam indication) and the message is neither being recorded in our database plugin nor transported via mail. On second try (easy, as all the data keeps being stored in the form, so you only have to click “send” again) everything goes through fine. Green success message and message really being transmitted.
    I thought maybe, for one reason or another, the user is being flagged as spammer first and then after a second try as not spammy… but when I tried to insert data again and send the form once more (no closing the page nor reloading, the form gets cleared by itself after successful sending), I once again got the orange bar.

    We’re using the latest plugin (5.1.3), with the most recent WP (5.2.1) (but the problem started with one WP before and wpcf7 5.1.1, I just recently updated while trying to debug the problem) and reCaptcha V3.

    Did anyone encounter a similar problem or could provide any idea what’s going on?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • We are experiencing the same issue. It failed the first time, then the next day it worked. I try again today and the problem is back. I don’t know if it has to do with cache or something else. No solution has been received yet.

    Ok,I think I was able to pinpoint the issue. The form would submit the information successfully as long as I was logged in to my WordPress account linked to the website. Once I logged out, the issue would reappear and the form would not work (I would get the “Failed to send… error in the orange border”). I suspected the issue had to do with the form being cached, which would mean that the form being brought to the website was the form from the previous Contact Form version, which conflicted with the new reCaptcha keys….a real mess. We use this W3 Total Cache plugin, so what I did was I added the contact web page to the list of pages I did not want to be cached. Here are the instructions on how to do it for this plugin https://www.redbridgenet.com/how-to-exclude-specific-pages-from-w3-total-cache/.

    Hope it helps!

    Thread Starter nopewhy

    (@nopewhy)

    Thank you very much for your detailed reply, @elibeckz!

    I was thinking in a similar direction as you and had a look at caching as well. We used the same Cache Plugin (W3 total) about a year ago or so. Since then it was deactivated and only browser-caching via .htaccess being used. I reactivated the plugin, purged the caches and uninstalled it completely (which takes some effort, to delete all of it’s folders).
    Since then (although there might have been a theme update in between, which skews the results) I couldn’t reproduce the problem anymore.
    Unfortunately a colleague could. She tested it in several browsers and everything seemed fine. Only IE (not edge, really, internet explorer) somehow managed to show the same behavior (orange spam-alert border first, then everything peachy after pressing “SEND” again). We’re still not sure whether she had some old caching files left in IE or whether the problem is not entirely solved.
    I’ll have to keep an eye on it and test it again from a few other computers (which are free from caching leftovers), when I get the chance.

    Would be great if this problem was really just connected to the (seemingly inactive) caching plugin.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 6 months ago by nopewhy.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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