SPAM PREVENTION IMAGE PROBLEM

lester · Post by **lester** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 12:30 am

Hello,

I keep having a problem with the way the Spam Prevention Image displays when someone views my blog.

It will start off with a display like this... A H 4 K 7 - Great!!

A few hours later, it will display like this... CAPTCHA1...CAPTCHA2...CAPTCHA3...CAPTCHA4...CAPTCHA5

So comments can't be added to the blog. Can anyone provide help? Thanks!

Lester

Post by **garvinhicking** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 12:04 pm

Hi!

If you only see "CAPTCHA1..." this means your blog is unable to render the images for the captcha string. This might be related to server trouble or so.

It definitely should not happen sporadically, there must have been made a change which made your captchas broken. Did you change settins, update your PHP server configuration?

What's your URL?

Regards,
Garvin

lester · Post by **lester** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 2:57 am

Hi Garvin,

The URL for the blog is
http://www.diversityspotlight.com/cblog/

It's very strange...Sometimes you can see the image (string) and minutes later they vanish - minutes later you can see them again.

Lester

Post by **garvinhicking** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 1:29 pm

Hi!

Could it be that inside your plugins/serendipity_event_spamblock/ directory the *.png files do not exist like they do in the s9y release and maybe they are not readable?

When I open a URL like:

http://diversityspotlight.com/cblog/ind ... aa172c1094

I should usually get an image, but I only get an empty document. This would only happen if the files cannot be read, do not exist or a Fatal PHP error occurs...

Regards,
Garvin

lester · Post by **lester** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 9:06 pm

Hi Garvin,

I was able to get aplus.net to fix the image issue. I can now see the spam image string which has an updated look.

However, its created another problem. Once you put the security code and hit submit, you get the following message

Permission deniedPermission denied

Not sure why this is happening. Any suggestions?

http://www.diversityspotlight.com/cblog/

Lester

Post by **garvinhicking** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 11:49 pm

Hi!

This can happen if you have configured the antispam plugin to use any "foreign" webservices like Akismet, Remote IP check, DNS blacklists or others.

Your server is firewalled, and thus you cannot seem to connect webservices like akismet to check for spam.

If you don't find the appropriate setting in your antispam pluign, tell me your configuration (take a screenshot) and I can tell you the ones you should change.

Regards,
Garvin

adamcharnock · Post by **adamcharnock** » Wed Mar 12, 2008 8:07 pm

Hi Lester,

I guess you have probably sorted this out by know, but I thought I would just mention that this seems like a fairly typical load balancing problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing)

The problem occurs because the site is served from several machines, which each (generally) have their own copy of the files in your web root directory. This can lead to problems when the web server writes a file to disk because the new file (i.e. the CAPTCHA image) will not be distributed to other servers in the cluster - which can result in the behaviour you saw.

I didn't think that this was common in shared hosting environments (partly for this reason), but having a look at aplus.net it seems that they do offer this service to their ded server customers - so maybe they apply it to their shared servers too.

Anyway, just my input in case you (or anyone else) finds it useful!

Adam

PS. Of course, this could be caused by something completely different! :p