Thread:Project:Support desk/Difficulty Installing Antispam Features/reply

>The problem appears to be from the shell having PHP 4.4.9, although the server itself uses PHP 5.3

Sometimes hosting providers have the php5 version of the cli client named something different (like php5). However if that was the case I imagine your hosting provider would of told you. Still I reccomend trying it just to see.

The checkuser install (AFAIK) simply adds some database tables. You can manually look at the .sql files included with the extension, and install them using some mysql thing

MathCaptcha requires texvc (extension:Math) which is probably the most difficult extension to install that exists (Its not impossible to install, especially if your server is the type where you can apt-get ocaml (which yours isn't), but still its significantly harder than the other extensions). Maybe FancyCaptcha would be easier, your host probably has python installed (and you can always generate the images elsewhere and upload them).

>The shear amount of difficulty I'm having getting things working makes me think there's a larger problem underneath,

While you chose some of the more difficult extensions to install. When doing advanced thingies with MediaWiki, having shell access with a php5 command line makes things significantly easier