One verifier, backend/app/services/captcha.py, and one widget,
components/Captcha.jsx. There were two copies of each and they had
drifted: the register widget loaded the script itself while the landing
one relied on a page-level effect elsewhere in its file, and on the
backend auth failed *open* on an unreachable Turnstile while contact
failed *shut*.
Both failure modes were kept rather than one quietly chosen, as an
explicit `fail_open` argument with the reason written down: an outage that
stops people creating accounts costs the site its users, while an outage
that bounces a contact message costs the sender one retry.
An unconfigured secret still skips verification entirely, as before, so a
site with no keys keeps working.
The keys in .env are empty. The Cloudflare ones there were live and are
now dead, so **there is no captcha on register or contact until hCaptcha
keys are issued** — this is not a state to leave a public site in.
Also corrected on the way: docs/frontend.md still documented
`login(email, password, turnstileToken)`, whose third argument had
already gone from AuthContext.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01TqXevQJhxFrM7jJg82cgZN
