Problems with recaptcha in some themes in OJS 3.4.0-5

Recaptcha works on these themes (OJS 3.4.0-5):

• Default Theme
• Manuscript
• Material Theme
• Bootstrap 3

Recaptcha does not work in these themes (OJS 3.4.0-5):
Classic
HealthSciences
Immersion
Pragma

Could you please tell me a way to make recaptcha work?
I am very worried because a few weeks ago some of my sites were hacked and I would like to be able to increase the security.
I checked the suggestions in this discussion Google recaptcha not work on 3.4.0-1 php 8.1 - #15 by asmecher but it didn’t work for me.

I appreciate any help in advance.

Hi @David_Alarcon_davidy,

I will flag one of our developers to review the ReCAPTCHA function on the themes that we maintain. But can you write a little more about the security issue you ran into? ReCAPTCHA isn’t intended to resolve security problems – just to reduce bot activity. Were you running an up-to-date release of OJS?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Dear Alex…

I had a test OJS version 3.3.0-8 site and suddenly I couldn’t access the site. Instead of the site I was shown another Chinese product sales website. When I checked the hosting I found folders named “xxx” in all the directories. It’s likely that I didn’t take all the security measures I normally apply for production OJS sites because it was a “test” site, but I was scared since I maintain several OJS from various institutions. I deleted the entire hosting immediately.
I have had no problems with other journals.

Hi @David_Alarcon_davidy,

OJS 3.3.0-8 is out of date, and has some known XSS flaws; lately we’ve received reports that look to me like automated tools making use of them to inject spam links. These flaws are fixed in the latest 3.3.0-x and 3.4.0-x releases, so I’d strongly recommend upgrading.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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