Below is the email newsletter sent to all of our BC customers on 4 July, 2018 regarding Adobe Business Catalyst's enforcement of Google reCAPTCHA v2 on web forms.

Dear Recipient,

On 29 June Adobe BC announced that due to a marked increase in spam web form submissions on BC sites, their development team would be enforcing Google's reCAPTCHA v2 module on all web forms where it is not currently implemented, starting 18 July, 2018. You can read the full announcement here.

The announcement makes 2 important points:

• Forms will be automatically updated by BC's development team
• This does not include payment forms, which must be updated manually

What is Google reCAPTCHA v2

You've probably seen it before. It looks like this:

In Google's own words:

"reCAPTCHA is a free service that protects your website from spam and abuse. reCAPTCHA uses an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive CAPTCHAs to keep automated software from engaging in abusive activities on your site. It does this while letting your valid users pass through with ease."

You can read a more thorough explanation by Google here.

Do I Need to Do Anything?

Depending on the design of your website, no further action may be required. The BC Development Team will be using a script which adds the Google reCAPTCHA v2 module automatically - probably above/before the "Submit" button. (We say "probably" because it is impossible to say how "smart" this script is and what form layouts/designs it allows for.)

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be examining all of the forms on all of our client websites and will make contact with you if we believe your site requires attention. If your site uses payment forms, these will need to be updated manually. If your site includes forms with an unusual design/layout, these may also need to be updated manually.

What About the BC EOL?

In our previous email campaign we explained BC's recent EOL (End of Life) Announcement, the implications for you and what we are doing about it.

Since then, we have investigated (and ruled out) a number of CMS platform options from our list of potential alternatives.

The features we are prioritising in choosing an alternative platform are:

1. Security: Losing control of your website to hackers is bad. We've had to pick up the pieces for other providers' clients on a number of occasions, but we've never had a BC site hacked. We want to find something equally secure.
2. Functionality: BC excelled in this area. There was very little we couldn't achieve using BC alone.
3. Ease-of-use: This was something we always felt BC could have done better.

We are making progress and will be in touch with more information for you in due course.

As always we are here to help. If you have further questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch via phone or email.

Kind Regards,
The indie.web Team