Submitting RSVP from event calendar causes “critical error”.

  • I am loathe to submit a question because I’m convinced I must have caused this somehow. However, I’ve been trying to figure this out for almost a week and frustration is a thing. Recently and I can’t say exactly when, my group is so small that the site could go days or more with no hits; I’ve had an issue with RSVP submissions by users failing with a “There has been a critical error on this website.” The plug-in has worked fine in the past. In an effort to trouble shoot, I’ve even created a completely new TEST website on a different host but still have the problem. When I enable logging I see reference to “Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function rsvphoney_login_now()” in “debug.log” (see below) I’ve also included the “rsvpmaker_log”. I have confirmed that WP can send emails. And, as I said this issue happens on 2 different sites on 2 different hosting platforms.
    Does anyone have a clue what I’m doing wrong? btw, I’m just a Harley rider who agreed to make a website for other Harley riders, I’m not a web developer. I’ve been stupid before and will be again. Thanks for any help. Bill

    debug.log (Google doc)
    rsvpmaker_log (Google doc)

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author davidfcarr

    (@davidfcarr)

    For some reason, the users experiencing this issue are triggering a routine that’s in there to prevent entries by spambots that run around the internet randomly filling in forms with nonsense and trying to inject malware. The “honeypot” strategy is to include a hidden field that users never see but bots will enter something into.

    But you’re saying these are just regular users? Not running some kind of automated testing against the site? I haven’t heard of this happening on other sites, but such things don’t always wind up getting reported to me.

    Maybe I’ll wind up needing to remove that code if there’s some circumstance where ordinary users are triggering it. There are other methods of preventing bot spam, such as using Google’s ReCaptcha (which RSVPMaker also supports), but they require a little more setup (getting an account and credentials from Google).

    I’d like to get a little more info from you before deciding whether this requires a change to the plugin.

    Thread Starter ballwm

    (@ballwm)

    I got it!! Your comment about spambots trying to auto fill fields gave me the clue. I have confirmed that in all 6 problem users cases there is an ID/Password manager in use. I have verified that both Lastpass and abine.com BLUR will trigger the error when you allow them to auto fill information such as name, email, phone#, and password. My wife uses Lastpass so I tested it with her computer by filling out the form using the lastpass plugin, causing the error, and without triggering lastpass’s auto fill feature which allows me to use the form with no problem. So it seems that ID/Password managers auto filling fields in the form triggers the bot trap. At least now I can tell folks how not to cause the problem.

    Plugin Author davidfcarr

    (@davidfcarr)

    Okay, I actually thought that could be the issue, as I’m a LastPass user. There are some tweaks I can try to make it less likely that a password manager would try to fill in that field.

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