Published on
August 29, 2010 at
3:20 pm.
I have found a bug in version 2.9.8 within the context of WordPress 3.0 Multi-Site which caused a fatal error. If this happened to you, you can easily fix this by renaming or deleting the wp-recaptcha directory in your wp-content/plugins directory. Upon doing this, WordPress will automatically disable the plugin.
I have already submitted an update with the fix as version 2.9.8.2, but it might take some time to show up in the updates section of your WordPress installation. You can download the version directly to install manually below if you want.
This bug only seems to affect users of WordPress 3 and above who are using the Multi-Site feature, of which support was just barely introduced yesterday.
Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. As soon as I heard of it I immediately began investigating the problem and working towards a solution.
I plan on releasing the new re-written version of the plugin soon which will make the project a lot more maintainable.
download WP-reCAPTCHA version 2.9.8.2
Published on
August 29, 2010 at
12:54 am.
A kind user, Tom Lynch, contacted me last week with a patch to the plugin which adds support for WordPress 3′s new multi-site feature. One of the major features of WordPress 3 was that it was finally going to merge with WordPress MU. WordPress MU (Multi-User) was basically a fork of WordPress that was geared toward websites that wanted to house multiple blogs, like wordpress.com. The problem with being a fork though was that it was updated at different intervals from WordPress, had scarce documentation, etc.
Now WordPress MU has been merged into the main WordPress project, so everything will be a lot more streamlined. Users can now simply toggle a “multi-site” option to enable or disable MU functionality, i.e., various blogs per website.
Thanks to Tom, support for this new method has been integrated into the plugin, version 2.9.8. The plugin still supports WordPress MU itself for websites that still use it. You can upgrade using WordPress’ automatic plugin updating functionality, or download it below.
download WP-reCAPTCHA 2.9.8
Published on
March 23, 2010 at
3:17 pm.
download fixed version 2.9.7 or update automatically through admin interface
Problem: Jeff Hunt from Muni Diaries was kind enough to inform me of a pretty big bug in the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin with WordPress 2.9.2. When a user tries to enter a comment and enters the correct reCAPTCHA response, the comment is, regardless, marked as spam and added to the spam queue.
Fix: Simon Wheatley over at the WordPress Discussion Forums realized that the fault lied in the recaptchalib.php file that the plugin uses. Simon speculates that reCAPTCHA changed their implementation. He and another user were able to fix this bug by downloading the recaptcha php library directly from the reCAPTCHA libraries site. Once downloaded and extracted, replace the recaptcha.lib file from the wp-recaptcha/ plugin directory with the one downloaded from the recaptcha site.
I realize this is a pretty major bug and I am going to submit an update to the plugin shortly, but will take time to propagate throughout the WordPress servers in order to ‘update automatically’ through WordPress. This is why I included the fix above so that users can apply the (easy) fix themselves in the meantime.
Please let me know if you encounter any other issues or need any additional help.
Update: I have submitted a formal, official fix as version 2.9.7 of the plugin to WordPress. It will take some time (maybe a few hours) before it propagates throughout their servers in order for you to see the update notification in your WordPress installation so that you can update automatically. If you are in a critical environment, you can use the proven fix outline above which is similar to the one I used in the plugin update. However, when you eventually do see the update notification for the plugin, I highly recommend you update anyways to stay in sync with the rest of the population (That way your plugin will be version 2.9.7 and not the old 2.9.6).
I am sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused. Please understand that I reacted to the problem as soon as I found out about it and submitted a fix to WordPress all within the span of about 45 minutes, while also making this post for those of you who need the fix as soon as possible. I also posted a link to this on twitter in case anyone might see it there. It turns out that it was actually a very recent change in the way the reCAPTCHA servers do things (in particular, an address to the verification server) and not a fault (bug) in the plugin logic itself, thankfully, which is why it was a pretty easy fix and why it was just noticed by people today.
Thanks again to the aforementioned people for bringing this problem to my attention.