WordPress Contact Form 7 And ReCAPTCHA v3

This post was originally published on December 17, 2018
The latest update to this post was made 5 years ago.

WordPress Contact Form 7 And ReCAPTCHA v3

I noticed after upgrading all of our websites to all new and improved Google reCaptcha v3 that SPAM started flying in…  There were over 20 messages within a 24 hour window, something that is quite abnormal considering on reCaptcha v2 we never got any SPAM. 

I went looking and found a few references to others having v3 issues with WordPress and the Contact Form 7 plugin.  You must use v3 with the latest versions of the Contact Form 7 plugin.  To combat the SPAM issues, you’ll need to modify the recaptcha.php file.  This file is located in your WordPress installation folder in the wp-content\plugins\contact-form-7\modules folder.  You will need to edit this file with a .PHP editor (or something like notepad/wordpad).  Its a plain text file.  I used the ‘code writer’ feature on Windows 10 to open it, so I could see line numbers.

You are looking for line #112 – the value of this line must be changed…

• OLD VALUE:  return $spam;
• NEW VALUE:  return true;

Save the file and the SPAM should stop.  You can also revert back to an older version of contact form 7 but this fix is probably easier that reverting to a previous version, at least until the powers that be fix the underlying problem.

Tags: #wordpress #contactform #techsupport #plugin #recaptcha