Fixing a Broken Captcha in Joomla 2.5 and 3

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.

I advise you to send a message to yourself from your contact form, if you have one, and see if it's working properly:

-If you are able to see the squiggly letters in your captcha feature, you're probably fine.
-If you see the word "captcha" but there are no squiggly letters, your form is probably broken.
-If you never had captcha installed, you may consider getting one, to save you from some extra spam.[/li]


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 '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'
See the change in the next patch: github.com/SniperSister/joomla-cms/commi...1c85aa605426c00bbf6a

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.