PHP Contact form with Captcha

[leonard]

There are a huge number of spambots out there nowadays and they try and use your contact forms to send spam. If you've been slightly careful, the spam is not sent to its intended recipients, but you end up receiving it.

One way of stopping this is using a Captcha, an image with text which needs to be entered in your form.

Here follows a brief example;
File 1: contact.php
File 2: ocr_captcha.class.php
File 3: arial.ttf (you'll need to upload this to the same directory as the above files) You can find this file in your %WINDOWS%/fonts directory on your computer

Put both files in the same directory. Create a new directory "tmp" to hold temp images. Give httpd full permissions on the "tmp" directory
Make sure you enter your email address in the $email_to value.

contact_example.zip updated to correct filename typo

[designGrrl]

Hi Leonard,

I'm trying to use your php captcha form and everything works great except that it doesn't submit my form to my e-mail. Is there something else that I should do besides the email_to?

Please forgive me as I'm a designer and not a programmer

thanks!!!
Dee

[leonard]

Hi Dee,

This can be caused by a number of server specific settings which would need to be catered for. The most common issue would be your using an email address which does not exist in your account as the $email_to value.

If you open a support ticket, I will have a look at your setup and let you know which changes need to be made.

When opening a ticket, please remember to include your HSphere username/login and the domain under which you've installed the script.

Kind regards,
Leonard

[designGrrl]

I had one of my programmer's help me figure it out. Looks like it was the absence of a php.ini file on my server.

D

[siherrera]

Hi Leonard,

thanks for sharing with us this material. I'm having problems with captcha image generating. the image does not appear. I created the 3 files, contact.php, ocr*.php and I insert arial.tff in the same folder + I created a new folder TMP inside the first one. But its not working, do you have any idea of what I need to insert.
regards
sebastian

[leonard]

Hi sebastian,

I'll post an updated package later today which will include some basic checking and debugging.

Kind regards,
Leonard

[leonard]

The example has been updated to include some basic checks for file permissions, GD module support and font file existance.

Just unzip the file and upload to where you want to test.
Remember, you need to upload the arial.ttf file as well. (Not supplied)

(UPDATED 02/14/2007 - fixed filename typo)

[siherrera]

Hi Leonard,

thank you so much, its working perfect right now... I want to ask you a question probably you can help me, if I want to redirect the form to a thanks page like
$location = "thankyou.htm"; what things I need to change, actually I found the last tag in the else loop of the bottom

mail( $email_to, "Contact Us - Inquire " .$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], $message, "From: " .$email_to ."\r\nReply-To: " .$email ."\r\n", "-f" .$email_to );
echo "Mail Sent to. Thank You!";

of course I can erase the echo and this would not be printed but I want to add (inside this if just to give the thank you to correct emails sent) a redirect to another page.

thank you so much.
Sebastian.

[siherrera]

Hi Leonard

sorry and thanks for your time. I have one more question, if I set TMP folder to writable a Login/pass pop up appear to log in the server to let the captcha image appear. On the other hand if I set the TMP read only no image appear so the form could not work. Do you have any idea why this is happening and how to solve it?.
best regards
sebastian