Autocrat stopped working after the V8 update. Here's what fixes it

What happened, briefly

Google deprecated the Rhino runtime (opens in a new tab) in February 2025 and said scripts still on it would stop executing after January 31,

1. The shutdown then rolled across Google's fleet over months, and it reached Autocrat

in the second week of June.

New Visions, the team behind Autocrat, announced the migration (opens in a new tab) on June 4 and scheduled their V8-compatible release for June 9 to 11. Google's shutdown arrived a day early. On June 8, users started getting "Execution failed. The Rhino runtime is deprecated and no longer supported," and for many the add-on would not open at all. The new version shipped on schedule the next morning, which fixed the crash and started a different set of problems.

I read the full support thread so you don't have to. The fixes below are the ones New Visions published there, plus what users reported back about each one.

Fix 1: Reauthorize the add-on

The V8 version is, from Google's point of view, a new application asking for your permission. Until you grant it, nothing runs.

1. Open the spreadsheet and launch Autocrat from the Extensions menu.
2. When the consent screen appears, check Select all, then click Continue.
3. If no consent screen appears, sign out of every Google account except the one that owns the Autocrat jobs, then try again. Multiple signed-in accounts confuse the permission flow, and New Visions specifically warns about it.

That last point solves more cases than it should. Teachers and office staff commonly have a personal and a work account signed in side by side, and the consent prompt goes to the wrong one.

If the sidebar still shows only Help, or you get "Authorization is required to perform that action," escalate to a full revoke: open your Google Account, go to Security, then Third-party apps with account access, and remove Autocrat entirely. Reopen the spreadsheet, launch Autocrat, and when the consent screen appears, check every individual checkbox before clicking Continue. Users in the support thread confirmed this fix repeatedly through June 17 and 18, and removing the app's access does not delete your existing job configurations. The trap is the partial grant: accept some permissions but not all and the add-on ends up half-authorized, which looks identical to broken and never prompts you again.

Fix 2: Reset paused triggers

Time-driven and form-driven jobs were paused by the migration and do not always resume after reauthorization. Google emails you when a trigger needs attention, but the email is easy to miss and the job just silently stops running. New Visions published this reset sequence:

1. Open Autocrat and go to Manage My Triggers.
2. Confirm that My Triggers lists both a form trigger and a time trigger.
3. Disable both triggers and click Save.
4. Re-enable both and click Save again.
5. Open the affected job, click through to Step 9, turn on the triggers there, and save.
6. Close Autocrat completely, reopen it, and check that Manage My Triggers shows the Trigger Owner and My Triggers fields populated.

Do this signed in to one account only, for the same reason as above.

Fix 3: Form triggers that still refuse to fire

For a stubborn subset of users, the reset didn't help: manual runs worked, form-driven runs didn't. New Visions suggested enabling a time trigger on the affected job, on the theory that one successful automatic run would re-engage the form trigger.

Reports in the thread were mixed. Some users recovered. Others, including school district staff running it at scale, replied that neither the reset nor the time-trigger workaround worked, and the team's last word on it, posted June 16, was that it was under investigation. If you're in this group, the practical move is to run the job on a time trigger set to every few minutes during your collection window. It's a blunt instrument. It also gets the documents out.

Fix 4: Tags that stopped merging

Two separate causes here, and it matters which one you have.

The first was a quota problem, and it's worth understanding because it explains a lot of mysterious Autocrat behavior. The error read:

GoogleJsonResponseException: API call to docs.documents.batchUpdate failed with
error: Quota exceeded for quota metric 'Quota group for write operations' ...
for consumer 'project_number:539341275670'

That project number is Autocrat itself. Every Autocrat user in the world shares one pool of Google Docs write operations per minute, and the V8 release burned through it. Jobs would start fine, then quietly stop filling tags partway down the sheet. New Visions requested a bigger pool from Google and got it by June 12, and their logs showed the error mostly gone. If you saw half-merged documents in June, this was probably why, and rerunning the job now should behave.

The second cause is characters the V8 version chokes on. Tags containing special characters like + or & failed to merge in single-entity mode, mostly with Google Slides templates; renaming the tag to plain letters made the merge complete. Rename it in the template and in Autocrat's field mapping, not just one of them. New Visions deployed a fix for single output mode on June 16, but a July 30 report in the thread still showed form-triggered runs dropping fields with unicode symbols in them while the same job merged everything when run manually. Plain-letter tags remain the safe move.

Two more template-side gotchas from the same thread, both found by users on June 18: parentheses or brackets in form question names interfered with merges until people renamed the questions, and an image placed in the template's header made runs fail. Moving the image into the document body, set behind text, fixed that one.

If it's still broken

Work through the list in order: reauthorize with one account signed in, do the full revoke-and-regrant if the menu is still bare, reset the triggers, give a dead form trigger a time trigger, strip special characters from tags and form questions. That combination resolves most of what the thread reports, and by June 19 one user's summary was that most people were back up.

The tail of the thread is less cheerful. New Visions' last posted update was June 16. After that, users kept reporting in: form-triggered merges dropping fields at the end of July, daily reauthorization emails on five separate merges in early August, and, as of mid-August, a plain "Is there any update to the issues we are still experiencing?" sitting at the bottom of the thread (opens in a new tab) without a reply. A new symptom is still worth posting there. Just calibrate your deadline to that reply history.

Autocrat survived the migration. It's still free, and for a batch of 30 certificates twice a year it's still what I'd point you at. Our comparison with Autocrat says the same thing, at length.

But the June outage is worth learning the shape of, because it will rhyme with the next one. Autocrat runs inside Google's Apps Script infrastructure, on Google's schedule, against a write quota shared with every other Autocrat user on the planet. Nobody at your school or company can fix it when it stops, and there is no paid tier that gets you out of the shared pool. The people hit hardest in that thread weren't hobbyists. They were running report cards, compliance paperwork, and client documents on a free add-on, and they found out during a deadline week.

SheetRender is our product, so read this part knowing that. It does the same job, one document per spreadsheet row, but the rendering and email run on our servers rather than inside your Google account, so an Apps Script migration cannot take it down and there is no shared per-minute pool with strangers. You upload a finished example of the document instead of tagging a template. It connects to the same Google Sheets spreadsheet Autocrat reads, and there's a Sheets add-on (opens in a new tab) if you want to run it from a sidebar; the add-on is a thin remote control, so the outage math above doesn't apply to it. Where it loses to Autocrat: your data leaves Google, output is PDF only with no editable Docs file, and it doesn't write merge status back into your rows. The free plan renders 50 documents a month with a "Made with SheetRender" line at the bottom, which is enough to find out whether the trade is worth it before an invoice enters the picture. Weighing more than these two? The spreadsheet-to-PDF comparison covers eight routes, including the free ones.

Quick answers

What does "The Rhino runtime is deprecated and no longer supported" mean? Your script, or an add-on you use, was still running on Apps Script's original JavaScript engine, which Google shut down starting January 31, 2026. For Autocrat users the fix was the June 2026 update plus reauthorization. For your own scripts, Google's migration guide (opens in a new tab) covers the switch.

Is Autocrat still supported in 2026? Yes. New Visions shipped the V8 version in June 2026 and answers questions in the support group. The migration was required by Google, not a sign the project is winding down.

Why did my Autocrat triggers stop firing after the update? The migration paused them pending reauthorization. Reaccept the permissions, then run the trigger reset in Fix 2. Form triggers were the slowest to recover, and some needed the time-trigger workaround in Fix 3.

Runtime migrations like this happen roughly once a decade, so the odds you hit another one soon are low. Shared quotas and paused triggers are weekly weather. Decide based on the weather.