I am interested in setting up the CAPTCHA verification, but since I am a UBB and PHP n00b, I am kinda lost. Do I need a special lib for this? Is it free or licensed? I am running win32, if that makes a difference

There are 2 ways to run CAPTCHA. The first would be with GD2. If you look at your phpinfo section in the control panel, if you see gd2 and freetype in the list, then you could use that. The second is imagemagick. This requires imagemagick 6 which is a free download. And you'd just specify the path to the convert and mogrify programs in the paths section of the control panel.

I have installed imagemagick and their test verifies that it's working properly. However no version of the path in the two path fields is getting the images to show up properly. They only show up as red (broken) Xs on the logon screen. I am being *innundated* with spammers and need to figure this out. What exactly does a valid path look like?

I'm on Windows by the way. I've tried every version I can think of of

c:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.3.3-Q8\convert.exe

and

c:\Program Files\ImageMagick-6.3.3-Q8\mogrify.exe

with slashes going left, going right, having the program name, just having the directory name, etc.

Also, when I view source, the /images/general/default/wait.gif that it's trying to show on refreshes really doesn't exist in that directory ...

...

OK I'm piecing this together. There was a wait.gif in the downloaded 7.1 set that wasn't in my live set, so I copied that in. I was also missing the CAPTCHA directory in my images directory. What else should I check for?

I've looked in the cache folder, and there are no images being generated in there ...

There are lots of entries in the captcha database table, so it's trying to make them ...

Are you using IIS or Apache? I ask because some webservers don't like \, instead try:
c:/Program Files/ImageMagick-6.3.3-Q8/convert.exe
c:/Program Files/ImageMagick-6.3.3-Q8/mogrify.exe

Windows IIS - I have tried both back slashes and forward slashes, and neither works. I went into the raw code and then in a CMD window typed in the string it was forming. It actually failed because of the space in program files. However when I moved down into the imagemagick directory and typed the command starting just with the convert command, with all the 'stuff' that came after it, it did make a gif file for me. So the syntax and program seem fine. I wonder if it really is the program files space jamming it - or if something else is going on. Like I said the random number is being written into the database, so it is trying to do something

AHA!!!!!

Just to test the space theory, I reinstalled ImageMagick in a directory just called C:\imagem - and it WORKED!!!!

Good God, that was 4 hours of my life wasted

lol I was actually going to tell you to put %20 as the space character; but yours works too! lol

just 4? oh just you wait... lol

It's 4 hrs on this one - but if you look back through the forums, I was out in Ukraine when my entire forum server went down, and I had to spend days dialed in from rural Urkaine rebuilding it from scratch. Then recently when I was down in New Orleans doing a charity visit, the other forums I run crashed, and I had to completely rebuild and port and upgrade the servers from there. So I have had my fair share of longer-than-four-hour agony ...