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Understanding reCAPTCHA
Understanding reCAPTCHA

Donation (v2) pages are equipped with reCAPTCHA to protect your account from fraud

Updated over a week ago

πŸ“Œ Note: reCAPTCHA is only available for Donation (v2) type pages, which work with NationBuilder's fully integrated payment processor.

What is reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is a risk analysis tool developed by Google to identify potential bots that would otherwise use your donation forms to test credit credits.
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Across the Internet, bots target online donation pages to test stolen credit cards so they can later use for other purposes or sell them. Protecting your donation forms against fraud with reCAPTCHA means bolstering the security of your donation forms and substantially reducing the risk that you'll have to manually refund and delete fraudulent donation activity from your database. Better still, the vast majority of your donors won't be asked to complete any extra steps to pass CAPTCHA on your pages, which ensures a seamless donor experience and protects your conversion rates.


How it works

With reCAPTCHA enabled, every donation submission is evaluated to determine how likely the submission came from a bot. If the likelihood that the donor is a bot is low, the donor will simply be able to complete the form and successfully submit their transaction.
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If the likelihood that the donor is a bot is high, the form will reload with an error message.
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1 error occurred while processing this form. You must pass reCAPTCHA verification

πŸ“Œ Note: If your website theme has been customized, make sure that credit card errors successfully trigger error messages at the top of your form like the one displayed above. You can test this by intentionally submitting invalid credit card details or a Stripe test card.
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If this error is triggered, the user's credit card number will be wiped from the form. An "I'm not a robot" checkbox test will be added just above the page's submit button at the end of the form.
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I'm not a robot checkbox

If the submission looks especially risky, the user may also be prompted to complete a random image matching captcha.

Move the "I'm not a robot" checkbox

The vast majority of legitimate donors should never see this checkbox. However, if you would like the "I'm not a robot" checkbox to appear somewhere other than above the submit button when triggered, you can paste the following code anywhere between {% form_for donation %} and {% endform_for %} in your page's template:


​<div id="recaptcha_checkbox"></div>

How to get reCAPTCHA

If you already use NationBuilder as your payment processor, you're set! reCAPTCHA will be enabled across all of your Donation (v2) pages automatically.
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If you're using a 3rd-party payment processor:

  1. Convert your Donation pages to Donation (v2) pages. reCAPTCHA will be available as soon as you publish your new pages.

  2. If you have a custom theme, upgrade your theme to include Donation (v2) page styles

  3. Check out our FAQ on fully migrating from your 3rd party payment processor to NationBuilder
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