Intermittent problem with form failing to send and continuous spinning arrows

  • Resolved Rick Curran

    (@rickcurran)


    11 years, 8 months ago

    Hi,
    I’m trying to resolve an intermittent problem with the form failing to send and the users just seeing the spinning arrows. I must emphasise the point that it is not consistently happening so trying to resolve via disabling plugins and switching themes is not possible. I have a form on a site that in all of my own testing so far has worked fine for me, but I know that it is failing to work for some people and they are just getting the spinning arrows.

    In order to test this further I have set up a couple of triggers using jQuery so that I am alerted via an email when someone starts the form and when they actually click on the Submit button. I send this trigger emails using a simple plugin I made so these emails are sent directly to me and not via Contact Form 7.

    I have now tracked a whole load of instances of the form being started and the Submit being clicked and then not working, approximately 50% of all submissions are now failing. It’s worth noting that I am getting all of the Start and Submit alert emails so this seems to indicate some issue within the Contact Form 7 plugin and it not being able to send.

    Part of the problem in trying to debug this is that I am still yet to have it fail for me, I have tried using various different browsers on different devices and it all works fine, but my monitoring methods indicate that it is failing. If I could get it to fail for me then I could inspect the page and see if there are any javascript errors on the page or something weird going on!

    I may have to stop using the plugin on this site if I can’t get this resolved. If there’s any additional info you can provide regarding the way that the plugin handles the submission then maybe I can debug things a bit further? It just seems odd that my own jQuery triggered emails are all going out fine but the actual form submissions don’t.

    Thanks for any help you can offer!

    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Takayuki Miyoshi

    (@takayukister)

    Do yo use any cache plugin? If so, what happnens if you completely disable it?

    Also, have you checked PHP error logs?

    Thread Starter Rick Curran

    (@rickcurran)

    Hi Takayuki, although I had checked my PHP error logs previously, your comment about PHP error logs made me go back and double-check them to see if there were any clues. As it turns out there are two locations for PHP error logs on my server and I’d only looked in one of them, when I checked the other location I realised what the cause of the problem is thankfully!

    Short answer:
    Apache mod_security spam rules

    Longer answer:
    I recently did a lot of server updates and had installed the mod_security module for Apache, I had included a set of anti-spam rules and it was actually these that were intercepting some of the form submissions. The form in question here is actually used for people to request repeat prescription from a Doctor’s practice and they were including names of drugs in the content of their message. So basically mod_security was matching up some of the drug names with its list of possible spam content and so the form processing was just failing silently and so the Contact Form 7 plugin just keeps sitting waiting for a response from the server. I have gone in and made some changes to my mod_security settings and the form now seems to be submitting happily so far!

    Thanks a lot for your help!

    I having similar problem after enabling “Really Simple CAPTCHA”.
    The submit spinning wheel just goes into infinite loop

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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