Issue with CAPTCHA and submission pages not working properly

LiveWhale
1

We have been noticing an issue where users fill out the event submission form, check the reCAPTCHA, and then click submit… and nothing happens on their end. Eventually, reCAPTCHA says the “Verification expired. Check the box again”. The submission goes through on the backend, but it never leaves the submission page for the “Thanks for submitting” page.

Has anyone else experiences this or know what could be causing it? Here is a link to the submission page. Calendar | Louisiana Tech University

2

A quick “+1” to say we have also encountered this with event RSVPs.

Nick

3

Hi Tom,

How strange: when I run a quick test in my browser on your page, it looks like the /live/public/submit/event request is 404ing (even though when I test that request separately, it works). We’ll take a look and see what we’re able to reproduce here and possible fixes; apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime,

Karl

4

Thanks, Karl! It’s very odd. We never changed anything. We found out about the issue because people kept clicking submit and we had multiple entires for the same events.

5

Karl,

Have y’all figured this out?

Thanks!

6

Thanks for the poke, Tom – I’ll check with the team and see if we can put a little extra gas on this issue.

1 Like
7

We’ve got a few more steps ahead on this – we haven’t been able to reproduce this on our servers yet, but testing on your install it does appear that events are getting submitted even though the public submission process returns an invisible 404 midway through—very strange, we’ll keep at this next week and let you know what we find.

8

Okay @tsoto we’ve gotten to the bottom of this! We weren’t able to reproduce on our servers, nor on your own dev server, so I made the decision to take this out of the forum and into our normal support workflow with a little comped time to test on your installation directly.

It turns out that what was happening had nothing to do with Recaptcha at all—rather, when someone submits an event, the email notification piece trying to connect to your SMTP server is failing and/or timing out, which causes the whole process to spin, even after the event has been successfully inserted into the LiveWhale events database.

We’re filing an improvement note for our roadmap to see if we can find ways to work around SMTP failures like this, moving the SMTP mail call to an asynchronous process so issues with SMTP don’t hold up the rest of the LiveWhale workflow. But, I hope this info helps in the meantime, Tom! Investigating your SMTP server is probably the next step we’d recommend. Feel free to reach out via the Request Help form if you run into more issues here or want our help troubleshooting further.

9

Thanks, @karl! I have our IT looking into it as well. It’s potentially a firewall issue. They are asking what IP addresses the connection would be coming from?

10

Thanks Tom – happy to provide those, would you mind submitting the question as a Help Request so we can reply outside of the public forum? Cheers,

Karl