Visforms Captcha

Hi Aicha,
Thanks for the great plugin.

I am having a problem with 1 website where the visforms captcha does not display the captcha image.
The website is at www.shegartonfarmcottages.co.uk and I have enabled the captcha for this form but as you can see no image appears.

I need to use the captcha on this website as some RU spammers are getting through spambotcheck and a captcha may stop the attack.

All the Joomla files and Visforms files are up to date.

Can you help me in any way?

Thanks

Joe

Hi Joe,

I can remember, that with Visforms prior to Version 3.6 there were sometimes problems with the display of the captcha image. As far as I can remember there were two different reasons.

First the router does not work properly (for which reason so ever) and therefore the image was not found. I changed this in Visforms 3.6. The link to the image is no longer routed, but because Visforms 3.6 comes with lots of new features and many view files are changed, so that you have to recreate template overrides if you have made some, I don't know whether updating to Visforms 3.6.10 (you can download it in the downloads menu) is a good option for you. (Making Backups, Running the update, Checking if everything works still fine, may be a lot of work and it is not sure, that the captcha problem will be solved by this).

Second the captcha image can not be created (and is therefore not available). Visforms captchas use the popular php captcha script secureimage to create the captchas and this script sometimes (rarely) does not work. There is an faq on the autor website www.phpcaptcha.org/faq
You could try to enable debugging on your website and turn all error messages on (Joomla! configuration) and look, if an error is thrown. Maybe, in addition with these faq's you can figure the source of the problem.

Alternatively you could try to use the google recaptcha instead of the Visforms captcha. This is a totally different technology and might work fine, even if the visforms captcha does not.

Regards,
Aicha

Hi Aicha,

Thanks for your help.

I have enabled the recaptcha but really prefer the securimage version as its more customisable for the website background etc.

Recaptcha does not seem to be able to be modified easily?

I will try the latest Visform update and see if that makes a difference. V3.6 does not appear to automatically warn that an update is available in Joomla 3 for some reason. Is it a complete new version?

Thanks

Joe

Hi Joe,

yes you cannot modify recaptcha easily, that is true. I don't know exactly if there are options on google itself, but I fear not.

You can call Visforms 3.6 a complete new version. I implemented lots of new features. As these features are no security features and most people hate updating again and again, I decided against displaying an update message automatically. Because I thought this might get people under pressure to update even if they don't really want to.

But nevertheless Visforms 3.6 is an update which you can simply run on your website and which should work without problems. But as I said, you might need to redo template overrides.
There is a release history www.vi-solutions.de/en/documentations/visforms/release-history and article about "Updates" in the Visforms documentation.

Regards,
Aicha

Hi Aicha,

Thanks for the update, I will download the new version and use that in future.

The template on the problem website is older than some others and is not responsive so I may update the template soon and that hopefully will also solve the problem as it only happens on this website and not my newer versions.

As always, thanks you so much for your prompt assistance,

Regards

Joe