Rails Recaptcha plugin always returns false - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm using the rails recaptcha plugin found here: http://github.com/ambethia/recaptcha/tree/master
I have signed up for an account on recaptcha.com, obtained a public & private key, and the site is configured with a global key (for now).
In config/environment.rb I setup the environment variables:
ENV['RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY'] = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
ENV['RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY'] = 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXxx'
In my view I render the captcha like this:
<%= recaptcha_tags %>
And in my controller processing this form I have this:
unless verify_recaptcha # <-- always returns false
flash[:error] = "Your captcha entry was invalid"
render :action=>'new'
return
end
My problem is that verify_recaptcha always returns false.
I must be missing something simple, but I don't see it. And before I get a smart-alec reply, YES I'm typing the correct words into the captcha box :)

Answer 1

Just as a note, make sure you didn't accidentally switch around the public and private keys; they are different.
I can't tell if you're already handling the possibility that it is correct, in which case you would want to have something like this:
if verify_recaptcha
#thing.save!
redirect_to success_path
else
flash[:error] = "There was an error with the recaptcha code below. Please re-enter the code and click submit."
render :action => 'new'
end
And remember to use:
<%= recaptcha_tags :ssl => true %>
If you are using SSL.

Answer 2

I went in and looked at the recaptcha plugin. The pertinent part reads something like this:
recaptcha = Net::HTTP.post_form URI.parse("http://#{server}/verify"), {
"privatekey" => private_key,
"remoteip" => request.remote_ip,
"challenge" => challenge,
"response" => response
}
This takes the challenge and response and returns a response. When I tried it with a challenge and response I generated, I got "true\nsuccess". The following lines of code return false if:
answer, error = recaptcha.body.split.map { |s| s.chomp }
unless answer == "true"
Since I got back "true\nsuccess", answer will be "true", and the code should therefore pass.
Can you try sending the response directly using Net::HTTP and seeing what response you get?