Sign-up: Email Verification & Captcha Not Working

My site is www.ettv.com and we are very excited about the potential of vShare. I went to test the site out by setting up a new account. The captcha was not working (it was unreadable), as it just showed a small box with a red "X" inside it. I had to go into Admin and "Disable" the Captcha.

Then I went to test the Sign-up feature and it seemed to work perfectly. After my submission it indicated that I would rec'v an email verification for my email account (gmail.com). I have waited about 1hr and nothing has arrived. In the Admin I am able to view inactive accounts and there I am. I have to deliver the site soon, so I dont have time to give you a chance to view the problem because I will now be forced to go into ADMIN and "Disable" the verification feature.

All help would be excellent. A little more info: I have this site set up at Godaddy.com VPS (virtual dedicated server). I will be waiting for anyones help. Thanks----AllenAttachment 81

There is likely two problems here:

1. The captcha is probably not working due to a lack of GD libraries being installed on your VPS. I would have Godaddy ensure that they are in fact installed.

2. With regards to the email, this may be due to Gmail. Google's spam system treats a lot of large hosting provider's IPs are potential spam and may have inadvertently sent your signup email to your SPAM folder (or, it could have dropped the connection all together. I would first check your spam folder. If it isn't there, you can do a check at mxtoolbox.com (enter your server's IP) and see if it's blacklisted anywhere.

Hello bplex;

Thank you for your insight. I have conducted a mxtoolbox.com blacklist search as you requested. No such luck. The results returned 103 results with two time outs and 0 blacklist. For your #1 request, which suggested that my "VPS may lack GD libraries" as the primary issue. I will be directing this question to my Linux server support guy, and I was wondering if you could expand on what GD libraries are? This way I can be sure to communicate your suggestion to my Linux guy, since I dont have Godaddy.com linux support. Thanks for your suggestions ....Allen

bplex, I am starting to think that your GD library suggestion is the issue. I went to add my user profile picture and this error appeared.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function imagecreatefromjpeg() in /home/ettv1234/public_html/include/functions.php on line 158

and I looked it up online and found a reference to the issue being related to the GD Library. Here is the site I found: Create Image - Imagecreate - Create Image PHP

I then saw a link to the GD Library in this article, which identified it as this:

The GD library is used for dynamic image creation. From PHP we use with the GD library to create GIF, PNG or JPG images instantly from our code. This allows us to do things such as create charts on the fly, created an an anti-robot security image, create thumbnail images, or even build images from other images.
If you are unsure if you have GD library, you can run phpinfo() to check that GD Support is enabled. If you don't have it, you can download it for free.

Thats two issues now for GD Library.----Allen

I just took a look at your site and GD is not installed on it so that is going to be the problem dealing with the captcha.

As for the emails, I also did a quick check and see that your VPS is running CPanel 11. Another quick check showed that SMTP (port 25) on your server is closed. This would suggest that your server is running CSF (ConfigServer Security & Firewall). CSF is generally included with CPanel 11 and is a bi-directional firewall (meaning that it can block both incoming and outgoing connections). If port 25, which is normally open on a Cpanel server (so that you can receive email) is closed inbound, it is also likely that port 25 is closed outbound as well (sending email). You may want to have your server people also check to make sure that port 25 is open in both directions on your server.