Trouble posting comments with captchas enabled on Mac

vincem · Post by **vincem** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 8:28 am

Hi,

My visitors are reporting being unable to leave comments from their Mac when the captchas are enabled in the SpamBlock. Has anybody had this problem before? I searched the forum but didn't come up with anything relevant to my issue... Using s9y 1.0Beta2 but it happened on previous versions too. Going to upgrade to 1.0 final now.

Cheers, Vince

Post by **jhermanns** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 8:47 am

i get a page not found there?

vincem · Post by **vincem** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 8:59 am

Oops, sorry, you're too fast for me

I'm in the process of upgrading the blog to v. 1.0 final, it'll be over shortly! By the way, I've disabled the captchas for the first 5 days, so if testing from a Mac, you'd have to comment to a post that's at least 5 days old.

Cheers!
Vince

Post by **garvinhicking** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 9:24 am

Hi!

Sadly I have no Mac, but it really should work if the people have their cookies enabled. Which browser are the people reporting to use?

Best regards,
Garvin

vincem · Post by **vincem** » Mon Jun 19, 2006 9:42 am

Hello Garvin,

They report using Safari and having cookies enabled. I've disabled the captchas temporarily and they have managed to comment, so I know it's the captchas and not spamblock as a whole...

I love version 1.0, by the way! Great job!

wagwag · Post by **wagwag** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 3:58 am

Are all captcha's supposed to be 5 characters? I just loaded your blog on my Mac in Safari 1.3.2 and tried to comment. The first time I tried to post the comment, the captcha displayed was only 3 characters, which seemed odd. Not surprisingly, your blog rejected my post. However, the next captcha displayed was 5 characters and after I entered it I was able to comment on the post successfully.

Also, I don't know if this is relevant, but I can't figure out why your captcha shows the characters all in one image, where my blog shows 5 seperate images; one for each character of the captcha.

vincem · Post by **vincem** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 4:08 am

Thanks for the feedback, wagwag.

I seem to remember getting captchas of 3, 4 and 5 characters, but I'm not 100% sure. I'll look into it though because you're right, maybe something is going wrong at that level.

As far as the letters appearing in 5 different images, no, never seen that on my Serendipity; don't kow which one is weird, mine or yours

wagwag · Post by **wagwag** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 5:02 am

I checked some other serendipity-powered blogs and it seems both the single image captcha and variable length captchas are completely normal. Perhaps I mistyped a letter in the short captcha on your blog the first time. In any case, the post was successful the second time, using Safari.

I wonder why my captchas are different. The font doesn't look as nice and crisp as yours either

wagwag · Post by **wagwag** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 5:44 am

To answer my own question, it seems I have a problem with freetype support in php. Freetype and GD jpeg support is required for the one-image captcha, therefore serendipity falls back to a different method of displaying the captchas on my blog.

vincem · Post by **vincem** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 5:51 am

Interesting, I wonder if the same kind of thing could be responsible for my own Mac trouble. I'll have to find more Mac users and try to figure out how many manage to leave comments...

wagwag · Post by **wagwag** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 8:58 am

I think my problem was unrelated. I fixed my php problem so now my captchas appear just like yours, and they work just as well, from Safari or Firefox on my Mac, or from my main desktop pc.

I went back to your blog with Safari and posted another comment, this time being very careful about the captcha. It went through the first try. It's hard to say what is troubling your users, but it doesn't appear to be a Safari/Mac incompatibility problem.

Post by **jhermanns** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 10:17 am

it =true]worked for me too, from a mac

by the way, the spamblock plugin logs things, so you can look it up in the db or the logfile (depending on the log location setting in spamblocks configuration)...

vincem · Post by **vincem** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 7:24 pm

Ok, thanks to a few of you, I now know that comments from Macs sometimes work. So the issue seems limited to specific Mac users.

jhermans, the spamblock log reported this in one case:

Code: Select all

[2006-06-18 04:52:35] - [REJECTED: Invalid captcha (Entered: jzmnx, Expected: )] - [#244, Name "Sigrid", E-Mail "", URL "", User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/312.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/312.6", IP 24.202.188.228] - [Ok, I really ... comment text here.]

The strange thing is that when the process fails, the "Expected" field of the log is often empty. As if the captchas hadn't properly loaded on her computer.

In another case (I believe it's yours wagwag) the log was:

Code: Select all

[2006-06-19 18:15:19] - [REJECTED: Invalid captcha (Entered: 7AB, Expected: 3NRY)] - [#235, Name "hello", E-Mail "", URL "", User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/312.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/312.6", IP 69.81.66.6] - [cute.]

Interestingly, you only saw 3 chracters but there were 5 indeed, and from what's indicated here, not even close to the ones you saw... I'm puzzled.

Glad you fixed your PHP and now have normal captchas

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 7:37 pm

Actually, that's only 4 characters. The paren is just for grouping the value texts together.

vincem · Post by **vincem** » Tue Jun 20, 2006 7:43 pm

LOL. I knew I should have stayed in school a few more years! Sorry, yes, 4 characters