• Issue
  • Translating the forum hits a captcha

My forum provides support for a worldwide community, many of which aren’t proficient in English. So I had the idea of providing automatic translations.

But if I go to:
https://translate.google.com

And then I paste my forum URL:
https://zenned.flarum.cloud

The forum hits a captcha that never resolves.

But if I do the same with:
https://support.freeflarum.com

It works.

I tried disabling the extensions hCaptcha and Canonical Url, but that did nothing.

    AlbertoSalviaNovella this is because of Cloudflare and has nothing to do with the extensions installed at your forum. The captcha is shown to suspicious browsers or devices, etc. (in other words, if the forum loads through Google translate frame, for example). The reason why it works on this forum is because it isn’t hosted at FreeFlarum, and therefore does not have the captcha.

    I can turn the captcha off specifically for your forum with your permission, at the cost of reduced protection against DDoS attacks and other internet threats, if you want?

    • Edited

    AlbertoSalviaNovella I have checked, and I actually don’t see an option to turn off the captcha completely in Cloudflare’s transform rules. I assume that I would have to turn off the proxy for your hostname completely, and in that case, it indeed is not worth it.

    Another important thing I forgot to mention before and have realized just now (sorry for that) is that browsers employ many other security practices to prevent cross-site requests, etc., which means that even if I allow Google translate to somehow display your website, you would definitely not be able to login and send a post, for example try it with this forum and you’ll learn that just browsing the forum normally will often produce error messages. Most of these limitations are introduced by security practices that are absolutely essential in order to protect your forum and user data, and I can’t turn off some of those either as they come from Google Translate’s side of things.


    In short, I recommend that your users use in-browser translation tools to translate the forum content (for example, Chrome-like browsers have a translation feature built-in, which will also let your users login and submit posts, as everything happens in-browser and not through an external website frame). There are also many language packs that you can choose from in your extension settings, which translate most of the UI elements. Or, figure out a completely different approach, like having discussions labeled with tags for different languages (see FoF Discussion Language extension which is available at FreeFlarum), etc…