3.4.0 bug fix for captcha validation

With the release of plugin version 3.4.0, there have been a few reports of captcha failing during registration.

In researching this issue, it was discovered that the validation was being run twice. The cause of this problem has been identified and a patch release has been pushed out – version 3.4.0.1

If you use any of the captcha options in WP-Members and you upgraded to 3.4.0, you should update to 3.4.0.1, which corrects the problem.

The technical reason for this problem is that 3.4.0 introduced the inclusion of two WP hooks in the registration validation process – register_post and registration_errors. Including registration_errors is intended to allow the plugin’s native registration to more tightly integrate with other plugins that may use WP’s native registration process, or with other security plugin and the like.

The problem came into play because the plugin uses registration_errors to hook into the native WP registration for validation, and part of that process is captcha validation (if enabled). So the inclusion of the filter hook in the WP-Members registration validation caused captcha validation to happen twice. That means the second time around a fail message is returned because the captcha has already been run once.

The patch is to simply remove the new hook addition from the WP-Members native registration until I can resolve this in a better way. Until that point, if you use captcha, update to the 3.4.0.1. If you do not use any of the captcha options, you can still update if you want to, but the change doesn’t affect you.

Incicently, this is probably a good time to mention that if your reasoning for using captcha is to avoid registration spam, in my opinion, captchas are ineffective at doing that. They are easily circumvented and they degrade the user experience.

There is a better option, and that is to run the registration data through a database of known spammers. There is a free plugin extension available for WP-Members that runs the data through the stopforumspam.com database. You can get it here.