I currently ran into the issue that I do not have the money to buy/rent any professional captchaing service.
So I tried to look around for OS captcha generators, and captcha designs.
I also had a brief brainstorm about my own and simple captcha design.
Do you have any preferences, or can give me a good advice handling captchas in PHP without having huge perfomance leeks?
(My attempt to design a simple captcha: .pdf)
EDIT: Thanks to all of you, I am sorry for only giving one “right-answer”, but +1 for every good answer 😉
If you want to design your own captcha, I highly recommend you take a look at this tutorial. It goes through a basic captcha design, allowing you to alter the design of the captcha as you wish, using various PHP image modification functions.
You could alter the code to use random fonts, make each character a different size, skew the image, etc. The tutorial is to show you how a code is created, how it’s used with a session, and how to actually use the image in an input form.