Just Ran the vB test and...

[Capt. Clay]

...everything checked out except for "GD". It says something about that keeping me from displaying images or something. Anyone else have a more in depth explanation for this? Thanks.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

GD (or the alternative ImageMagick) are used to generate thumbnails and CAPTCHA images. One of these should be installed or you will not be able to use either CAPTCHA's or thumbnails.

[feldon23]

Captchas are those images that you have to type a series of letters or a word which is distorted and colorized. It is an anti-spam feature.

If you cannot get the GD or ImageMagic libraries installed, then you will not be able to prevent spam.

Also, thumbnails, resized avatars, etc. depend on these libraries.

Usually your web host will include GD when they install the web server applications (PHP, etc.).

[Capt. Clay]

Thanks for the info guys. Is there a way I can install "GD"?

To be honest, I'm not even fully sure of what "GD" is. I'm not completely computer illiterate but I've never tried to ad a bulletin board to any of my websites before. When I call my hosting service, I don't even know what I need to ask them in regards to this and I can't find anything about it in my control panel when working on my site.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Steve Machol]

That has to be done by your host since it's compilid into PHP.

[feldon23]

GD is a graphics library that allows you to write programs that do the kinds of manipulations possible in Photoshop. In other words, you can write a few lines of code that load a JPEG, resize it, rotate it, add some text, change the color, and save it back out to the disk. ImageMagick is a similar library that is arguably more powerful but fewer servers have IM installed than GD.

Your webhost would have to recompile PHP with GD. Hopefully it's just an oversight on their part and they won't mind doing this but some hosts can be rather resistant to the idea of reinstalling the server software.

[jasonlitka]

That has to be done by your host since it's compilid into PHP.

It has to be done by the host but it's not necessarily compiled into PHP. If it's a RHEL or CentOS box then it's generally as simple as "up2date -u php-gd" or "yum install php-gd".

[Capt. Clay]

Thanks for the help guys! Chatted with tech support and since I knew what I need to ask them (thanks to you guys) they walked me through enabling GD and now the vB test says I pass on all criteria.

Thanks!

[Augusto]

Installing GD on a Cpanel server

This is how I did it on my Cpanel server runing redhat:

First take a look at how your PHP is setup:

Login as root into your server:
go to a a directory for any of your sites such as .../public_html/
Type:

php -i > CurrentPHPinfo.html

Go to that site and add "CurrentPHPinfo.html" to the end of the url such as:

http://www.yoursite.com/CurrentPHPinfo.html

Take a look at the info and print it.

Look at this line:

Configure Command './configure' '--prefix=/usr' '--with-xml' '--enable-bcmath' '--enable-calendar' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-magic-quotes' '--with-mysql=/usr' '--enable-discard-path' '--with-pear' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-track-vars' '--enable-versioning' '--with-zlib'


Second re-build your apache with the GD option on the PHP selected

Go to your CPanel and go to: Software --> Apache Update

Look at the build and click on the GD option inside the PHP options and make sure that the other ones that are in the configure command line that you printed above are also selected.

Click on "Start Build" and wait for quite a while until it's done.

Testing it:

Once it's done go to vBulletin Options --> image settings
On the image verification library select GD (true type font) or GD(Simple Font) save it and you should have the image now.

Augusto.

[feldon23]

Of course 99% of cPanel users do not have root access.

cPanel/WHM really prefers it if you do not try to reinstall software from the commandline but instead do so from within WHM. That's what I do and no problems so far. It has a control panel with checkboxes for each of the modules you want to install including GD and GZIP.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Guys, i know you only try to help, but the user already posted in post #8 that his host helped resolve this. Ading more information will only confuse this Pre-Sales thread.