CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

most likely you are missing some image libraries that PHP needs to be compiled with for CAPTCHA (gd, png etc). I'm not sure of the exact things you need compiled into you php5.so, but you should check the PEAR documentation and requirements for Text_CAPTCHA (and Image_Text) at http://pear.php.net. from a quick web search: To run the CAPTCHA classes, your PHP must be compiled --with-freetype-dir (FreeType support), --with-gd, and with gd's png support (compile PHP with libpng).

In 2.1 we've switched to using ReCAPTCHA (http://www.recaptcha.net/) and get around this issue

lobo

Is it possible to use reCAPTCHA with CiviCRM 1.9.12432? I see that there is a version of the Drupal reCAPTCHA module that works with Drupal 5, which, as you know, works with CiviCRM 1.9. If we could use reCAPTCHA with CiviCRM 1.9, we might be all set.

Could you point me to the recaptcha code in 2.1, and to the files I would need to change in 2.0 or 1.9?

Would there be risks in upgrading from 1.9 to 2.0? What would be the best way to mitigate those risks?

Thanks.

With respect to permissions:

I originally was seeing a nastier error. Then I looked at the path to the file mentioned in the error message and created a directory there (which didn't exist before that). After that, I stopped seeing an error message, but I didn't see the image, even though the captcha image file was written to the directory. The directory, by the way, is the one mentioned in Global Settings as "Images". I tried making that directory writable to groups and the public. (Previously, it had only been writable to the owner.) But that didn't make the problem go away. The image files that are being produced are writable only by the owner but readable by everyone. I was able to download the image files and download them to my machine, where I could look at them. They seem like ordinary captcha image files. Anything I'm missing here?

you might want to check your web server cache rules. most likely the browser is using an old cached image and does not referesh on every page load from the server

lobo

This is part of your web server config. I dont know anything about your hosting situation so cant be of too much help

if using apache, check: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_expires.html

alternatively, you might want to hack CRM/Utils/CAPTCHA.php and generate a new file name for every request. that will bypass the web server caching issue

lobo

For future reference I had the same issue regarding drupal-captcha-civicrm. What it turned out to be for me was the fact that the url my.domain/files was not re-written to my.domain/sites/my.domain/files which is where my files (and captcha images) were. This resulted in the image file not being found when the profile pages were loaded.

The resolution for me was to add a rewrite rule for the /drupal/files folder in my /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file
<Directory /path_to_drupal/drupal/files>
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /sites/%{HTTP_HOST}/files/$1 [L]
</Directory>

The same type of rule could be added to your .htaccess file in the /drupal/files folder if you use those instead.

I'm not sure if this is a drupal issue, or CiviCrm but it directly affects the use of Captcha with CiviCRM on multi-site installations.