oot cause found, fixed, and verified on ruthannpeacebrown.sites.forbesbooks.com.

Summary below, plus exact steps to replicate this on any other Forbes site with the same issue.

What was actually happening

This turned out not to be a Divi bug, and the message wasn’t coming from the contact form. The forms on these sites are Gravity Forms, and the message everyone was seeing, “Thanks for contacting us! We will get in touch with you shortly.“, is Gravity Forms’ own built-in default text. It just happens to read like a contact form reply, which is why it looked like the wrong form’s confirmation.

The chain of events: with reCAPTCHA enabled, Google gives every submission a trust score from 0 to 1. Any submission scoring 0.5 or below gets silently filed as spam. Since Gravity Forms, spam-flagged submissions don’t get the form’s own confirmation message, they get that generic fallback instead, unless a “Custom Spam Confirmation” is configured on the form.

So low-scoring visitors saw the wrong message, got no PDF, no notification email was sent, and their entries went to the spam folder. Repeated test submissions almost always score low (our tests scored 0.1–0.3), which is why the bug seemed to appear whenever reCAPTCHA was on.

The fix (applied)

1.Form Settings → Form Settings → “Spam Detection” section → enabled the Custom Spam Confirmation toggle and saved.

2. This adds a “Spam Confirmation” entry under Settings → Confirmations. Edited it to show the same free-chapter message and PDF download button as the normal confirmation.

3. Re-enabled reCAPTCHA on the Download Free Chapter form.

Verified: with reCAPTCHA on, even a low-scoring, submission now shows the correct “Thank you! Your free chapter is ready to download.” message with a working PDF button. The contact form still shows its own message. High-scoring submissions behave exactly as before.

If the same issue is happening on other Forbes sites, the same fix should work.

the fix corrects what the visitor sees, but low-scoring entries are still filed under the Spam tab in Gravity Forms entries (by design, that’s the spam protection working). Worth checking that folder occasionally for legitimate download requests, on this and the other Forbes sites.