Enabling google's Captcha/recaptcha in Joomla

Captcha’s are parts of a website where you sometimes need to type in a word or recognize the images to prove you're a human. Captchas are a great way to prevent spam activity on your website because most "bots" that attempt to post spam cannot read the letters contained in the captcha image.

For years, using Captcha sites prompted users to confirm they aren’t robots by asking them to read distorted text and type it into a box, like this:

But, Google has released a new API that simplifies the reCAPTCHA experience by just directly asking the users whether or not they are robots. They’re calling it the “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” and this is how it looks:

In this blog, we're going to walk you through the steps for enabling ”CAPTCHA/ReCaptcha”, a popular captcha system from google to our joomla websites.

1.  Log in to your website’s administrator back-end account.

2.  Go to your Plugin Manager. You can find this under the Extensions drop down menu in the top menu or in the Control Panel page.

3.     Edit the Plugin Captcha – ReCaptcha

   

a) Set Status to Enabled

             

     b)  Copy and paste the Site Key and Secrete key in their appropriate fields.

o  You will get the Site and Secrete keys by signing in with your Google account (create it if you don't have one) here: Create a reCAPTCHA key

o  Once you have register your website domain, Google will provide your ReCAPTCHA keys.

c)  Click Save & Close    

4.   To enable reCAPTCHA

   a) For Contact forms and the Registration form

 o Go to Global Configuration, and select the Site tab

 o  Choose Captcha - ReCaptcha in the Default Captcha field.

  o Click Save & Close

b)  For the Registration form only

 o Go to the User Manager. You can find it under the Users top menu or in the Control Panel page.

 o  In the Component tab in the Options (Click on options on the right side, you get component tab)

Choose one of the following for the Captcha:

o   Use Default - that is the default setting and follows the Default Captcha field setting in your Global Configuration.

o   None Selected - that setting ignors the Default Captcha setting in Global Configuration. Use it when you want ReCAPTCHA in the Contact forms but not in the Registration form.

o   Captcha - ReCaptcha - Only needed if the Default Captcha in the Global Configuration is set to None Selected but you want the ReCAPTCHA not in Contact forms but in the Registration form.

o   Click Save & Close.

That's it!