In the middle of a load for a page that has a GF modal popup, there are 3 requests for what appear to be CAPTCHA images. These requests (wrongly) set a new PHP Session ID cookie. It appears to be caused by the GF plugin not calling session_write_close() before die(), or something similar but more Wordpress-y. Firefox rolls with the original cookie from the main page’s response, but Chrome immediately starts using the new, worthless session cookies as soon as these CAPTCHA images load. I tried to open a support ticket, but the support website just goes in circles.
I’m unable to replicate the support form issue. Have you tried clearing your browser cache and cookies?
Gravity Forms fields don’t use sessions. Based on the image-based Captcha, I believe you are using the Really Simple Captcha plugin and the Captcha field. That field is no longer recommended because of the accessibility issues it introduces, the Really Simple Captcha plugin hasn’t been updated in 2 years, and its own developer no longer recommends using it.
I recommend removing that field and using the Cloudflare Turnstile Add-On or the reCAPTCHA Add-On, which includes support for the score-based v3 keys.
Certified developer GravityKit recently updated their free Zero Spam add-on with additional checks, including an AI-based check.
Gravity Wiz, another certified developer, recently released a new free add-on, Spam Hexer, that uses a proof-of-work check and also supports using AI.
Other solutions for dealing with spam can be found in the following section of the documentation:
Thanks for the info, Richard. We’ll swap out the CAPTCHA plugin for a newer one.
After looking further, it turns out that a rather misbehaved custom theme was indiscriminately calling session_start() in its functions.php file, which was causing problems for any unlucky request to a non-sessions-using plugin.