You need to upgrade to current version as recaptcha was updated in v4.9. We had a lot of good fixes for security and privacy as well as a lot of bug fixes.

https://support.socialengine.com/php/customer/en/portal/articles/1642513-admin-panel---settings->-spam-and-banning-tools?b_id=14386 this is the recaptcha tutorial for enabling it at your site. The other tutorial linked in there wasn't needed as it was the same details.

Andy Holmes said:

Thanks Donna for your quick reply. 

The instructions from Google to upgrade to v2 instruct me to insert a script into the header. Are you telling me this is not necessary in my current version of SE PHP (4.8.11). Its been a year now since setting it up and don't remember how I did that.

I have considered upgrading to 4.9. Our experience though has taught us to hold off on significant upgrades before making the leap. I'm referring to other products we support in our enterprise, not SocialEngine.

But, with regards to SocialEngine, the number of upgrades/patches within the past year has concerned me as I am unaware of your change control procedures and policies. I am also concerned about the impact on 3rd party plug-ins i use. Fortunately there aren't many. I really appreciate your efforts to provide a certified vendors marketplace. A big win if you ask me.

Thanks for you time!

Andy

Very good points Andy. When I worked at phpfox, there were many clients that waited to upgrade until I had upgraded my own live sites. At that point, they figured it was "safe to upgrade" as I am also very cautious with upgrading major versions. I also use very few plugins (actually only my own at this time) and so upgrading is done on a staging site before my live.

I had 4.8.11 when I started and upped that to 4.8.13. Once we had the security vulnerability reported, I made the leap to 4.9 (forget which release) as I always upgrade for security fixes. That and the privacy fixes tipped the scales for me. I was going to wait but with something like that, I don't. Privacy and security are top factors. That being said, the upgrade went without a hitch and I'm on 4.9.4 now. 

Yes we released patches and versions between 4.9.0 and now (4.9.4). Those are necessary fixes and I'm on most current patch. If I were you, I would get a clone and do the upgrade as all experts I know of have updated their plugins and you do want the fixes in 4.9. There are changelogs for every release other than patches, posted in the blogs. Just check those for changes if you need to but what I do is use beyond compare and check any files I may have modified so that I can see any changes to those files and apply what I need. I do very little modification. I removed the "remember me" as that's a security risk on any script on both my live and my demo (for the plugins I make). I made a few other changes to the demo for various things it had to have done as a demo.

Upgrades on demo and live have not had any issues at all. You probably want to fix google recaptcha if you keep that version but it's not advised to keep it. Oh and you also can't use the certified products on version below 4.9.4p4.