PHP Captcha 1.0 released

Today I am releasing PHP Captcha 1.0.

The main difference of PHP Captcha from other free or paid PHP implementations is, that it is written to utilize ImageMagick functions through the wonderful MagickWand PHP API to create CAPTCHA images that are hard enough for bots to crack, while more readable by humans than the others.

Quoting Aleksey Kolupaev of OCR Research Team, to whom I am thankful for his help on PHP Captcha:

“Everything can be cracked, but this one is a hard nut.”


PHP Captcha has a lot of configuration options including:

  • Random background colors
  • Random background noise
  • Random text fill and stroke colors
  • Random text string length
  • Random font size
  • Random text direction
  • Random character rotation
  • Random image swirling
  • Random foreground noise and so on…

The default configuration of PHP Captcha is based on a simple principle told by Aleksey: When average users come to your site and read a CAPTCHA image, they tend to enter the characters they read from left to right first, instead of reading any instructions that may accompany the image and say “enter X characters from the image” or “enter the text in the direction the arrow in the image points to” etc. PHP Captcha tries to address the needs of the sites with an average user base as default. But it also has a lot of options for you to customize your image according to your user base.

You can download PHP Captcha from the downloads page.