Google Scholar reCAPTCHA error - access blocked; no images

[Lora Hanson]

I am the institutional admin for an academic library and we have encountered several errors regarding reCAPTCHA when trying to connect to Google Scholar.  The errors are now at the point to where our users cannot access Google Scholar through our library list of resources at all.

Current error (after logging in through our institutional proxy) states: 

<broken img tag> "Please enable images" and then a submit button followed by a section labelled "About this page" as attached (see Error1 attachment).

Previous error with Google Scholar & reCAPTCHA May 2016:

About a month ago, we encountered an error with reCAPTCHA when trying to connect from our library to Google Scholar that also did not display any images and went straight to an error message:  "ERROR for site owner: Invalid domain for site key" (see Error2 attachment).

(Note: same error occurs in Chrome version 51.0.2704.84 m as well as IE version 11.0.9600.16428 and Firefox)

These errors are becoming increasingly difficult to compensate for and causing significant problems for our students.  Sure, they can go to Google Scholar outside of the library's site, but then they have to go through extra steps to get it connected with our library collections instead of being able to go through the entry point that we created where the connection between Google Scholar and our institution has already been established.

If any moderators from Google are monitoring this group, any insight would be greatly appreciated!

[Seth Munroe]

It looks to me like you are going through a server that is acting as a reverse proxy for your traffic. If you own the sites that you're accessing through the reverse proxy, then you can register the reCAPTCHA key to support the domain names generated by your reverse proxy. This doesn't look like the case to me though. You cannot access reCAPTCHA through a reverse proxy without the reCAPTCHA key owner specifically allowing your reverse proxy's domain.

-Seth

[Lora Hanson]

Thanks for the reply, Seth!  

If we were able to reconfigure the proxy to become a forward proxy instead, do you think that could resolve the issue (or at least get the reCAPTCHA images to display for our users to then interact with)?  Or is this just a no-win situation where we would have to drop the proxy authentication all together to provide direct linking only?

Again, I really appreciate your reply! Thank you!

-Lora