Error validating the Captcha

Archive
21

Congratulations, saveva :wink:
This gives me new hope.

I had already set these settings in both places, in the form plugin configuration and in the page frontmatter. The captcha is displayed correctly and the check is successful(!), but after submitting the form I always get the error ‘‘Error validating the Captcha’’.

By the way: The error message comes not from google-captcha-response directly, comes from user/plugins/form/languages.yaml by form processing user/plugins/form/form.php line 324.

22

The response error code which google recaptcha api sends, is “missing-input-response”.
This page developers.google.com say, what google-captcha api means: “The response parameter is missing.”. But I think, the parameter realy was sent… (???)

23

Now I know that the reCaptcha on my live server (at HostEurope) make problems, but when I copy the project 1 : 1 to my second server (at Hetzner) this copy works perfectly. I needed there only, because of the other domain, the other keys in this form-plugin registers and already it functions there.
But why it work not on my live server?!?! What can be different there? What could I look out for?

24

I could find the solution.

At first, I found out, that the same project installation with the same content (except the keys for the reCaptcha, which were each domain-dependet) worked on the one server fluently with the reCaptcha, but on the other not (look above). So I compared both queries and determined that one of the servers generated its query with & a m p ; and the other, as requested by the google-reCaptcha specification worked only with &. The & a m p ; may not be, because then the reCaptcha reports an error (success:false).

After that I take a look, how Joomla solves that problem. I use many Joomla installations on my 2nd server, which all run smoothly with reCaptcha forms. There I’ve seen the following code, which doesn’t work with http_build_query($Arr), but which use urlencode(stripslashes($value)). I changed this in user/plugins/form/form.php - and now it works on both servers very well.

                // Validate the captcha
                $query = "";
                
                // modif. generat array for later use in foreach
                 $queryArr = array(
                    'secret'   => $recaptchaSecret,
                    'response' => $form->value('g-recaptcha-response', true),
                    'remoteip' => $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'],
                    'v'        => 'php_1.0',
                );
                // bad solution:
                $query = http_build_query($queryArr);
                
                // replacing better solution:
                foreach ($queryArr as $key => $value) {
                    $query .= $key.'='. urlencode(stripslashes($value)).'&';
                }
                // echo '<br />$query new/solved:'.
                $query = substr($query, 0, strlen($query) - 1);
                // echo '<br />$url: '.
                    $url = 'https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/siteverify?' . $query;

                $responseStrg = file_get_contents($url);

It would be really good if you can take my modification into the core.
I think that the Joomla developers have not groundless chosen this variant for query generation.

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