Steps to resolve the broken Captcha in Joomla 2.5 and 3

In this article, we are going to discuss about How to solve/fix the broken captcha in Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3. A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3 contact forms comes with the default captcha function.

Using Captchas can greatly reduce the amount of spam you receive.

However, many of these forms (including mine) stopped working because Google changed the URL used for ReCaptchas.

This is mostly impacting Joomla 2.5 and 3.0+ sites at the minimum. This fix will be included in the next Joomla 3 release but in the meantime, it's not good to have a broken contact form.

Here's the fix for Joomla 2.5 and 3 sites

The fix is taken from this joomla.org doc.

Go to plugins/captcha/recaptcha/recaptcha.php and change:

    line 22 (or thereabouts) to the new RECAPTCHA_API_SERVER URL of 'http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api'

    line 24 (or thereabouts) to the new RECAPTCHA_VERIFY_SERVER URL of 'www.google.com'

    line 129 (or thereabouts) to the new RECAPTCHA_VERIFY_SERVER value of '/recaptcha/api/verify'

You will need FTP access to make this change, or perhaps your hosting control panel has a file manager that lets you edit files. In either case be sure to make a backup of the existing recaptcha.php file before making the recommended edits.