"Stronger Captchas" won't scramble

[i.speiser]

I've got a little problem with comment-spam - who hasn't?
After moving our blog from an old MT-system to s9y it lasted only about two weeks until the spammers found it.

While it's not a big problem to manage the trackback spam (activated the Trackback-URL-checking, which seems to work perfectly, catching about 50 spams a day ), I still receive a reasonable amount of comment-spam - even though I've got captchas activated for every post. Seems, either there is a backdoor in the system or the captchas were not strong enough.

I tried to use the option "stronger captchas" - but the captchas won't scramble. They still look very clear. Some ideas anyone?

System is Serendipity 1.0, PHP 4.3.11 and Spamblock-Plugin 1.51.
Blog URL is http://lawgical.jura.uni-sb.de

Regards
Iris

[i.speiser]

Just a little follow-up to my post before: I noticed that the captcha-characters seem to be separate (kind of "standard") graphic images - instead of one single image. I can imagine, this kind of captchas is easy to break.

It seems to me this may be a fallback system for captcha-display in case the stronger one doesn't work.

Regards
Iris

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

That can definitely be the case! "images only" only get served as a fallback if your webserver does not support GDLib! The best way would be to ask your sysadmin to install PHP's gdlib support...?

Best regards,
Garvin

[i.speiser]

Thanks for the hint. I'll forward this to the sysadmin.

Regards
Iris