Webmaster Forum / ColdFusion / Advanced Techniques / August 2006

I've been using Alagad Captcha on a number of pages to keep spam robots off
guestbooks, forums and other features. I've been very pleased with it, but I'm
having one problem.

I have it set up to create the captcha image file and display it using
CFCONTENT with deletefile="yes". When I test it, the image displays properly
and the file is deleted. But every day I find dozens of captcha image files in
the directory where they should be created and then deleted.

These images are only created when I invoke the captcha component, and I only
do that on pages where I also display and delete the image. So how are these
images being created? Is it possible if a robot calls my page that the image
gets created but since it is not displayed, it does not get deleted?

Here's how I create and display the image:

<cfset mycaptcha = createobject("component", "Captcha").configure(capdir)>
<cfset captcharesults = mycaptcha.createcaptcha("",randword)>
<img src="captchaImage.cfm?image=#capfile#">

And here's the captchaImage.cfm code:

<cfcontent type="image/jpeg" reset="No" file="#url.image#.jpg"
deletefile="Yes">