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Hi guys,
I installed @ismael’s reCAPTCHA plugin because I was getting bombarded by spam via the contact page—and VERY grateful for his taking the time to create it. However, the plugin has two unwanted side effects:
1). It adds a captcha not just to the contact form, but also to the Mailchimp signup form.
2). It completely stopped all ad revenue—$0 earned since plugin activated because it interferes with the ads.This second side effect is a huge deal to me. I host ads via Mediavine, and they pinpointed the issue. Here are their findings and suggestions:
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Thank you so much for your patience while we worked with our engineering team to investigate the issue with your ads. After some investigation, we were able to track this down to an issue in the JavaScript for the reCAPTCHA that was implemented on your contact forms. More specifically, the script is setting a variable titled “parent” that is somehow affecting the “window.parent” variable that is built into the Document Object Model.Our script relies on this built-in “window.parent” variable to place our ads in the correct positions. Without it, a JavaScript error is being thrown and our scripts are not able to load any ads on the page. The exact place in the reCAPTCHA code that is causing the conflict is at Line 2719 and 2727.
It is hard for us to determine the exact location of this JavaScript file as it appears to be optimized and cached…. When I bypass the caching an optimization, I see the script is being added inline, directly into the <body>.
To get your ads all back up and running, please disable the reCAPTCHA that was added to the contact forms. You should be able to utilize an alternative contact form plugin that support reCAPTCHA instead as this does not appear to be a conflict with reCAPTCHA itself, but rather, a poor implementation by Avia.
Thank you for passing this on to the Enfold developers! I hope they’ll be able to make some adjustments to get that working for you. I had another quick chat with one of our engineers and he believes that the solution could be as simple as renaming that “parent” variable by a single character.
***********What are your thoughts on this?
At the moment, I’ve deactivated the plugin despite the spam, as otherwise I wouldn’t be able to earn revenue via Mediavine. I am certain that I’m not the only Enfold user who also runs Mediavine ads, so this is likely killing revenue of many Enfold users.
Do you think there’s a fix that’s not too difficult to implement, or do you think in this situation I’m better off with a third party captcha plugin?
Thanks for the help as always!
Hey Uncannystevo,
Sorry to hear of your issues, I have been working with a few members that have been using the plugin and still getting a lot of spam, I have also seen members that don’t use the plugin, but only Google recaptcha. I believe that using the Google recaptcha is not effective now due to the number of blackhat sites exploiting a bypass.
I don’t mean the plugin that Ismael created, I mean the Google recaptcha that the plugin used. Please Google “bypass recaptcha”
I realize that perhaps it’s been working for you thus far, except for this issue in the script effecting other parts of your site.
Other members have had very good results with using the Contact Form 7 with the Honeypot addon instead.
I recommend replacing your contact form with this setup, which will block the spam and remove the error to your revenue.Best regards,
Mike
- The topic ‘Enfold's reCAPTCHA plugin spam fix is KILLING ad revenue because of one variable’ is closed to new replies.