I’ve been asked many times recently where people can enable the reCAPTCHA on their Mailchimp signup forms. A search of the Mailchimp support articles shows various help posts with advice such as ‘We encourage you to enable reCAPTCHA on all your embedded forms to prevent spambot signups. When reCAPTCHA is enabled, subscribers must check a reCAPTCHA box in a pop-up window after they click the button inside the confirmation email’.
The advice is great except that there is no option in the signup form builder to enable the reCAPTCHA. Mailchimp is now automatically enabling reCAPTCH for all Mailchimp provided forms; there are no options to enable or disable the reCAPTCHA.
People do find the reCAPTCHA annoying however it does reduce the amount of spam signups to lists significantly.
Have you tried a form using the reCaptcha option through Mailchimp on a mobile device? It asks the user to, for example, click all the images provided that show trees (or waterfalls).
It would be amazing if it was just a check box on mobile, too!
Hi Sherri. The matching options are generated by reCaptcha when it suspects there is a chance that you’re a ‘bot.
How do you turn this ‘click on a tree’ crap off? Our clients are finding it frustrating to use..not thinking about the amount of people who will just give up and leave the process when it asks them to find a damn street sign!
Gary: https://www.organicweb.com.au/22169/email-marketing/mailchimp-recaptcha/
Ditto J Northey,
And yet worse. I cannot get a test of my form for the recaptcha to let me download to my own PDF. It goes around in circles: recaptcha, click, form is empty. Fill out form, recaptcha, form is empty, etc., etc.
Huge investment of time getting Mailchimp set up and not one single bit of use out of it. Will probably have to leave.
Hi Blythe,
Mailchimp doesn’t allow the recipients of campaigns to upload content to Mailchimp servers; if I understand your description correctly, you’re wanting recipients to download a PDF via a link on a Mailchimp campaign. The recipient will then fill the PDF file with content and then need to upload the completed PDF to Mailchimp?
Unfortunately the above isn’t possible. If you do require people to fill forms and submit then https://acrobat.adobe.com/au/en/acrobat/how-to/fill-sign-pdf-forms-electronically.html may be an answer.
MY capcha isnt working – it says captcha failed everytme someone tries to sign up – meaning im losing potentially thousands of customers – as Ive no idea how long this has been going on for – since I had my sign up form in place over 1.5 years! TO SAY IM frustrated and disappointed would be an understatement 🙂
Any tips how to remove the captcha failed robot would be greatly appreciated 🙂
Hi Gary
Hope you can help with. I have used the default “Forward to a friend form”. Is any chance I can disable the “reCaptcha” box. It is add up as default and unable to find any URL as well. Thanks.
Kelly
The mailchimp recapture isn’t mobile-friendly. It asks you to check boxes for images of trees (buildings, etc), but it doesn’t work at all!
If you select the images and click, verify, you have to copy and paste some code, which doesn’t copy. If you click “subscribe”, it says “fail” and you have to select images again.
This is so frustrating!! Please allow your clients to turn recapture off! I would much rather deal with spam sign ups than have my potential clients hit this brick wall.
Hi
I have a translationproblem zith the recaptcha. I’ve made a sign up form in dutch and one in Englisch.
I can change the text of the recaptcha, but not the instructions of the recaptcha, so people receiving a dutch text with recaptcha instructions. I’ m getting desperate, how can I get the whole recaptcha in Engelish?
hello janis.
i had the same question too.. and i recently found out that mailchimp captcha is served on the language parameters of each browser settings. for example if your settings are english then the captcha instructions are in english. you can test it by switching to a other browser (like firefox) set it up in dutch and the captcha will work in dutch.
in simple words the captcha (google) identifies what language a user has in his browser settings and uses that language for captcha instructions.
Hi, Gary
mailchimp’s double opt-in is good but i want to disable recaptcha opt-in confirmation email .People do find the recaptcha annoying. i just opted in someone else ‘s email it just confirmation link. there is no recaptcha option. i just signed in to garyvaynerchuk media. so how they remove it recaptcha . is there any possibilty that at least when people signed in and then receive email with confirmation+recaptcha . so it little time saving instead of another email and again confirm them with recapthca confirmation?
Dilshad, many third-party sign-up forms include the ability to disable the reCaptcha. MaiLChimp includes the reCaptcha but many third-party forms that integrate with Mailchimp don’t bother with reCaptcha.
Gary, I’m using mail chimp with shopify. so how can i disable recaptcha ?
I think people find recaptcha annoying.
according to mailchimp knowledge base, how double opt in works
1. Sign up forms
2. opt in email
3. confirmation
that’s fine.
4. but after that another email and another opt in confirmation with recaptcha.
i want only above 3 not the 4th option .
Seems enough has been said re the inconvenience, but for me, there is now another issue. Since MC introduced this I am having people in China tell me they can’t see any CAPTCHA. This is annoying as I too lose potential readers, China is a HUGE market for us.
But the issue is I found, that MC are using GOOGLE for their CAPTCHA and Google is blocked in China- several other countries too. So, if you are having a: “where is the freaking CAPTCAH issue” this may be yuor problem too. Yep, VPN solves the issue, but few of my potential readers have one.
To rub salt into the wound, I tried to Email MC only to find I had to complete the CAPTCHA which I could not see. Sheesh.
I hate to leave MC, have been with them for 6 years, but….. unless there is a work around I see no alternative.
I’m using a Mailchimp sign-up form on my WordPress site but the captcha is not showing up , therefore I’m getting alot of Spam sign-ups? Help!
I’m wondering whether it’s a bug. It’s happening on my site as well and I am using blogger. I have even clicked the button to indicate I want the captcha. It isn’t working!!!
But how do I enable this on embedded forms? I see that MC has it on general forms after hitting submit, but all submissions are automatically sent without captcha showing up on submissions from my websites.
Hi Jeff, go into your list then:
reCAPTCHA will now be enabled on your embedded forms.
Thanks for the reply Gary, but whenever I click submit, the form just submits. There is no captcha included.
I’m having this problem too!