for the last few days recaptcha has stopped working for our ecommerce site. we are unable to take orders now and cannot disable it without other errors. Please help. this just started within the last few days.
it doesn't go past the recaptcha
It seems that reCAPTCHA is conflicting with MooTools in Joomla. One option, if your site doesn't make use of MooTools, is to remove it entirely. In your theme's index.php, add the following code after the line <jdoc:include type="head" />
<?php
unset($this->_scripts[$this->baseurl.'/media/system/js/mootools-core.js']);
unset($this->_scripts[$this->baseurl.'/media/system/js/mootools-more.js']);
?>
If your site does utilise MooTools for various interactive functionality this won't work. Instead you could try and find an updated mootools-core.js file in case that solves the problem.
Update: a now-deleted answer suggested this plugin: MooTools Enabler/Disabler. Using this you should be able to disable it only on specific pages, if you need to use MooTools in some circumstances.