Form submit error

Hey @lucafedele89 – Thanks for contacting us!

I looked into the website, and I was able to replicate the issue wherein the form would give “The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator.” error message.

The issue occurs because of the difference in the cache lifetime on your site and in the token lifetime of the anti-spam protection option (which is set to 2 days) that is enabled by default in your forms (please, look at the screenshot where you can find this option).

Solution

I checked on the site, and you are currently using the W3 Total Cache plugin which is possibly causing the cache issue on the form thereby preventing the form’s submission.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this: disabling anti-spam protection or decreasing the lifetime of your cached pages.

1. Here is how to disable the anti-spam protection on your form. And you can use any other method from our recommended options.

2. Decrease the cache lifetime on your site to 45 hours in your caching plugin settings.

3. Or, you can increase the token cache lifetime; we have a guide here.

In case it helps, here’s a tutorial with the most common ways to add custom code like this.

For the most beginner-friendly option in the guide above, I’d recommend using the WPCode plugin. This will protect your code from updates and keep it easy to manage right within your WordPress admin area.

I hope this helps! Could you please let me know if I can clarify any of the information above or provide you with more details?

Thank you! ??

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by Prashant Rai.

Hey @lucafedele89 – I hope you got the chance to look at the solution I shared. Since we haven’t heard back from you, for now I’m going to close this ticket. But if you have any questions, please feel free to reachout.

Kindly,

Hey @prashantrai… for first thank you… thank you very very very (very very) much for spending your time for my problem… but it don’t works =/.

I triyed to decrease the cache lifetime to 45 hours?but the only option i funded is “Expires header lifetime” in the CSS & JS option of the “browser cache” in W3 total cache settings, but i’m not sure that this is the right option to set. It was set in 3.150.000 seconds. Do you know where i can find the cache lifetime option to set in W3 Total Cache?

Have i yet told you how much i thank you???

Hey @lucafedele89 – Thanks for following on this ticket!

When you have sometime, please navigate under Database Cache > Maximum lifetime of cache objects, and set the value here. Here’s a screenshot for more details.

You can also consider using the other solutions I shared in my previous response.

Please let me know how it goes!

Kindly,

Hey @prashantrai… unfortunately it don’t works =/… i try now the other solutions you suggest and give you feedback then!… thank you very very much!!

I have a similar issue, I also use w3tc. Last update was on 28.02.2023 WPForms Lite (from version 1.8.0.1 to 1.8.0.2), today is 16.03.2023 and the problem was first brought to our attention about 4 hours ago. I do not use database cache but do use object cache with 7200 seconds as default life time of cache objects. I have excluded contact form page from page caching, yet issue persits. Disabling form antispam protection fixes the issue (captcha remained without issue). Perhaps its relevant we were under an automated sql injection attack last night. Please advise how to fix the issue without disabling form antispam function. thank you,

Hey @lucafedele89 – Sure – please try the other solutions I suggested, and if you continue to experience issues, don’t hesitate to let me know. I’ll do my best to assist you further.

@protestkit To prevent any potential misunderstandings, could you please create a new ticket and provide me with the details? I would be more than happy to assist you.

Kindly,

Hi @prashantrai… i’m already here to give you some feedback about the problem with WP forms.

This morning i realized that we hadn’t been receiving contact for a few days, so i did a test and… the problem was back!

I thought back to last week and the only thing done on the site was the publication of a new article (both in ITA and ENG version) and therefore, to make anew test, I deleted some old articles and … IT WORKS!

Is it possible that the problem exists only from a certain number of articles published up? Is there any way to check if there is any kind of correlation?

Thank very very much!!

Hey @lucafedele89 – Thanks for following on this ticket ticket!

Ideally publishing articles should not cause the issue. When you have sometime, can you please try disabling the anti-spam feature under Settings > Spam Protection and Security? When you do that, please be sure to enable one of the captcha tools (reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile) we offer to prevent spam submissions.

Kindly,