Captchas died on the Spam Protector

Forrest · Post by **Forrest** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:20 am

I enabled the spam protection plugin on my Serendipity blogs after being flooded with spam in the comments about a week ago. The captcha facility was basic but worked well.

I noticed this evening that instead of putting out the image of random letters and numbers like it usually does it was putting out a string that said...

CAPTCHA1CAPTCHA2CAPTCHA3CAPTCHA4CAPTCHA5

...instead.

Has anybody had this experience before? Is there any way to fix it?

I've shifted over to comment moderation, but I'd rather be using the captcha feature and have no idea why it just quit on me.

Help please!

robw · Post by **robw** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 9:15 am

Hi Forrest,

Have not seen this particular error before. If it was working before, something must have changed (obvious, huh

.

The most common issue is a plugin problem. Hhave you added any new plugins lately? - if so, try removing it, or putting the spam protector plugin first in the list.

Hope this helps.

Cheers
Rob

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 10:11 am

Hi!

Also, please tell us the URL to your blog, then I can check some things.

As robw indicated, it is often caused by editing PHP Files that have a space/newline before the first <?php or the last ?>, or because a provider might have changed things on the server (like upgrading PHP, removing GDLib, changing session settings)

Best regards,
Garvin

Forrest · Post by **Forrest** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 3:18 pm

To get at where it happened just link to...

http://www.3DReplicators.com

...and then hit the blogs button to get you to Serendipity and the comments link to get you in the comments.

Mind, I turned off the captchas and am currently using moderated comments instead so that people can comment at all. Are you going to be able to see anything with it in that state? I can turn it back on for you if you want or if you'll tell me what you would be looking for I can turn it on briefly and look myself.

Thanks!

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:10 pm

Hi!

without the captchas being enabled, I sadly can't have a look. I would have downloaded the captcha image via wget and inspected the binary result file. In most cases inside that file I would either see PHP errors or the whitespace/linefeeds I spoke of.

Best regards,
Garvin

Forrest · Post by **Forrest** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 4:25 pm

Hi Garvin!

I've turned the captchas back on for you so that you can have a look. Thanks so much for taking the trouble.

You can see the problem at...

http://www.3dreplicators.com/cgi-bin/cb ... l#comments

Thanks again,

Forrest

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 11:12 pm

I tried to do Garvin's magic, but it's not working for me. I just get the URL as a text string. And I can't select the text, either; it's like there's a Flash applet there or something.

Perhaps you're using one of the text-replacement plugins, and it's interfering by mistakenly recognizing your CAPTCHA as text to be replaced with a Flash font effect?

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 9:34 am

Hi!

I just visited the page but could not see any Cpatchas. So you would need to turn them on again for me (I live on CET *g*).

Judeberts tip sounds interesting, I'd like to have a look at that

Best regards,
Garvin

Forrest · Post by **Forrest** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 1:36 pm

Hi Garvin,

I've turned the captchas back on for you. I tried deleting and reinstalling the spamblocker without any other event plugins with it. It didn't improve matters. It's currently installed with the "announce entries" plugin installed before it.

Keep well,

Forrest

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 2:09 pm

Hi!

Ah, great.

Okay, the image of a cpatcha is this:

http://reprap.win.aplus.net/cgi-bin/cbl ... a0dff6074f

When I call this via unix' WGET, I get a 0 byte image return.

This means that no data has been emitted. This can have these causes:

1: Your PHP has a faulty PHP GDLib installed and cannot process TTF files

2: In your spamblock directory the *.ttf font files are not readable

3: Your Server spews out a fatal PHP error that is supressed in the output.

To eradicate 1 and 3, please ask your server provider if he has enabled the PHP error loging and investigate that logfile for any errors.

Also ask your provider if your PHP GDLib has TTF support enabled and compiled, and which version ttf-support and gdlib has/is.

HTH,
Garvin

Forrest · Post by **Forrest** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 3:55 pm

Thanks Garvin!

I'll do those things. On item #2, is there any way to test whether the .ttf files are not readable?

Best,

Forrest

Post by **garvinhicking** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 10:29 am

Hi!

Yes, for #2 you can check if the FTP permissions allow "read" for the webserver user.

HTH,
Garvin