We are updating the blog installation here to the newest version of WordPress. It’s a little behind but we are running all our blogs from one WordPress install so things take a bit longer to update. A few hours of updates and we are ready to go, everything seems fine on our test server so tomorrow you should be seeing all this in WP 1.5. The only thing on the front end that looks very different is the authorization image we are using (the image with a code you must enter before you can post a comment).
We are currently using authImage to stop comment spam bots and it got a pretty hefty update for the new version. It used to generate images that looked like this:
Obviously that font was kind of ugly but it doesn’t look to clash on most of our pages. I kept meaning to change it to something more “Walker” but I’m glad I didn’t because the new version is really crazy (in a bad way i think). At it’s best the new version looks like this:
but often it looks worse, like:
It is actually hard for me to read the last one the distortion is so severe.
I started reading up on PWNtcha, a script that breaks authorization images and now I see why they changed it. Still I would like something a little less ugly on our pages so I’m currently digging through the WordPress Reference on the subject to see if I can find something that does the job just as well.
** UPDATE **
Actually the Auth Image plugin is very modifiable. I started using some of our custom fonts, a set of Walker images and i toned down the filter. It is not as unbreakable as the original AuthImage but I think it will work fine for us. New authentication images look like this:
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