If you update your website to Joomla 5, one of the questions you may ask is: Where is the Captcha plugin?
You have been using Google's Recaptcha or Invisible captcha solution for years with Joomla 3 and Joomla 4, and these plugins are integrated into Joomla's core. These plugins were available by default on a new Joomla installation and you only needed to set up your keys. In the captcha plugin in your Google account.
Since Joomla 5 captcha plugins have been removed from Joomla core.
Why did the plugin captcha disappear in Joomla 5?
Official information from the Joomla developer channel:
Remove outdated captcha from core.
This will continue to retain the invisible captcha for existing installations and will remove the old recaptcha.
This means that
Recaptcha has expired and will no longer be available.
invisilbe captcha is still available
But invisible captcha is no longer part of the core in the new Joomla 5 installation! So keep in mind that unless you have a previous version (and it may be up to date) you won't be able to find it on your website.
Some suspected that emails from Google announcing the price change for the captcha solution might also have contributed to the decision to remove captcha, but there is no official information on this. We will also note that this price change comes solely from Google. It affects the business plan, not the small ones.
There is some debate that invisible captcha will still be part of Joomla 5 core, but at the time of writing these lines it is still not in it. I hope this will change soon.
