'eh its my private dev server, I haven't even bothered to poke around for new options lol... I'll check.

Sounds much better as "Visual Verification"

Ahh yeh that was it, a simple update and ImageMagick is running; it works quite well on the registration screen :).

Well I've not investigated but this software mentioned is probably for Linux, regardless. I would think that many whether on Linux or Windows hosting will not have the option to install any new sotware to make this work.

Certainly there must be some other method to achieve something similar. It's not being used as encryption/security rather just to thwart robots from completing the form.

What about hundreds of tiny images that can semi-randomly be put together to form something, or something similar that does not require more 3rd party software?

.

Both GD and ImageMagick I believe can be installed in a windows enviroment; GD I believe is intallable as a PHP module (which if you don't have php, you can't run UBB7). Most servers come with ImageMagick and GD pre-compiled.

You can get ImageMagick for both Linux and Windows as a free download. ImageMagick is nice because it doesn't require root access to install.

Most webhosts have ImageMagick or GD2 installed as they are both pretty commonly used. Any gallery type software requires one of them to be installed. Just about all of the CAPTCHA systems out there use one or the other. Nowadays it's more common to find a host that doesn't have one of them installed than it is to find one that doesn't.

The problem with a bunch of images put together is they all have an actual filename. Someone that wants to automate their bot just has to take the time to see what filename corresponds to what image and they could crack it just by looking at the img src.

So basically though if they don't and the host provider won't allow it then the user is SOL. Which means you now have to place upfront verbage on the product that it REQUIRES such and such as well. I can tell you that my own server does not have it on Linux. Can I get it, maybe, maybe not.

Just seems there must be another way to do this.

Even installing "modules" beyond the basics some hosts won't do because it potentially affects ALL sites, not just yours.

I'm not trying to fight you guys on this, hopefully I'm making a suggestion to further the product with as little impact on users as possible.

.

Eventually, more than likely with 7.2, we'll start to have basic photo gallery type features. So GD2 or ImageMagick will be required for those features to work. So even if it was possible to find another way to use CAPTCHA, we'll still be adding ImageMagick/GD2 as a requirement for all of the features to work.

I don't believe "root" ahs to install imagemagick, i believe a user can just upload the binaries to the server and link to the path via the ubb cp.

As for the gallery, my Melto Gallery uses the jhead binary for some image manipulation, but it also supports both GD and Imagemagick

Okay no problem. But GD2 seems to have had a last update on 11/03/04

and also says: Windows DLL .zip (NOT CURRENTLY FOR PHP)

I'm not up to speed on this software though and hopefully upcoming UBB releases will run properly on Windows hosts as well.

I'll have to brush up a bit more on GD for windows. I went the ImageMagick route on my windows test box and just installed the windows binary.

http://www.imagemagick.com/www/binary-releases.html#windows