Happy 2025! Our first releases this year focus on improvements to our reCAPTCHA v2 support, and making sure readers on networked sites don’t accidentally purchase duplicate memberships.
Improved reCAPTCHA v2 coverage and error messages
In the past couple weeks, we’ve made improvements to the reCAPTCHA v2 support in the modal checkout and other blocks. Some of these have gone out as hotfixes so they’re already running on Newspack sites; others are going out with today’s release. Specifically:
- We’ve prevented bots from being able to make direct requests to the WooCommerce checkout page, which had enabled them to bypass the reCAPTCHA check.
- We’ve improved reCAPTCHA v2 functionality in the modal checkout, to make sure all interactions there are checked.
- We’ve also updated the reCAPTCHA v2 errors that display to readers. This helps make it clearer why a checkout or form submission has failed, and asks the reader to try again.
Prevent readers from purchasing a duplicate membership in Newspack Network
In this release, we’ve improved subscription handling across sites using Newspack Network. This makes it so when readers purchase a membership on one site, they’re automatically become members of all sites in the network.
If a reader tries to purchase a second membership, they will be presented with an error message on checkout letting them know that they already have access to the site:
Other changes
- [FIX] Automatically enable account creation in the WooCommerce settings. This update prevents a fatal error when checking out via modal checkout while account creation options are disabled.
- [PERFORMANCE] In this release we started queuing reader-related data events, and syncing them in a single group instead of separately. This should improve overall site performance on sites that sync reader information to their ESP.