Can I disable CAPTCHA on my forms?
No. CAPTCHA on opt-in forms is quickly becoming the industry standard. It was a strong suggestion from our friends at Spamhaus, to prevent the practice of "listbombing"—bots subscribing a bunch of unsuspecting people to lists in order to upset our deliverability. It's a cruel practice and we're excited that it is no longer possible with Kit.
Keep in mind that not all subscribers will see CAPTCHA. There are certain parameters that trigger CAPTCHA, and a regular subscriber will likely not trigger it.
Will all my new subscribers see CAPTCHA all the time?
No. CAPTCHA has to be triggered. There are a couple of things that can trigger it, such as the same IP address subscribing a couple of times, or the same email address subscribed across multiple accounts. Even something as simple as being in an Incognito window can display CAPTCHA.
The purpose of CAPTCHA is that it displays based on certain behavior. By that definition, it will not display to all subscribers all the time; it is dependent on their behavior.
What is the "this field is for spammers" and why is it showing up on my forms?
This field is called a "honeypot" field. If you use our forms, this field is completely hidden and will never be seen by a normal subscriber. Bots, however, don't see a form the way we do. They just see fields that need to be filled out, and so they will fill out everything, including hidden fields. Filling out this field will return a "success" message, but the email address will not be passed to Kit.
Why am I seeing complex CAPTCHA (selecting images)?
Are you in an Incognito window?
When you're Incognito, you're not sharing the same information you would in your normal browser, so Google gets a little suspicious. They serve you more complex CAPTCHA, beyond checking a box that says "I am not a robot." You might have to select all the pictures with waffles or street signs. Using an Incognito window is pretty common when testing new visitor behavior on your site, but not necessarily for new visitors to your site.
Keep in mind that an Incognito experience is not representative for your subscribers as a whole!
Is my integration affected?
Very few integrations have been affected by the introduction of CAPTCHA. Here are the known affected Integrations:
Leadpages (Standard Builder Only)
PopupAlly
Contact Form 7: please contact us at [email protected] if you are using Contact Form 7. We don't currently have a fix but we are working on it!
We will update this list if we learn of more affected integrations.