Thread:Project:Support desk/Difficulty Installing Antispam Features

Hello all,

I recently created this wiki and am having difficulty combatting spam. Mainly, I know what needs to be done (install extensions, activate CAPTCHA, etc), but for some reason everything I attempt encounters some random, impassable problem, and it's getting really frustrating. I'd be incredibly grateful for any help you can give in any regard (like different extensions to try, or ways to get some of things I'm going to list working). I'm experienced enough with programming, but I'm inexperienced with server management, but if you bear with me, I'll do my best to get things working.

Wiki Info
Wiki Version: 1.19 PHP Version: 5.3 SQL Version: 5.0

Hosting Provider: Godaddy with Apache

ConfirmEdit is Being Naughty
Extension:ConfirmEdit came installed with the wiki. However, the only CAPTCHA-like service I've been able to get working was SimpleCaptcha (simple math problems), and frankly it did nothing to reduce spam. I really want Assira (cat selection captcha), but after setting it up, it would just refresh the page after selecting the cats. This seems like the easiest one to debug and get working (though you never know.) Finally, I tried MathCaptcha, but it eventually required me to build something using Make-- problem is, my system has neither Make nor GCC (with which I could compile and install Make.)  Apparently I need an older version of GCC to compile it, so... any ideas? Perhaps I have GCC and don't know it?

I'm fairly certain I didn't misconfigure any ConfirmEdit options themselves (the instructions are pretty straightforward)... perhaps I misconfigured something while installing the Wiki?

CheckUser is Misbehaving, Too
Without a way to prevent the spam, I decided I'd at least try to manage it. So, I tried installing Extension:CheckUser, but as you've probably guessed, it failed to install as well. Basically, I completed all but the last few installation steps, and once I ran "install.php", the following happened:

Extension_talk:CheckUser

EDIT: The problem appears to be from the shell having PHP 4.4.9, although the server itself uses PHP 5.3. Weird, but customer support explained it pretty succinctly. Normally you could get around this by running the php script from a web browser, but it spits out "Must run from command line" when attempting to do so... any ideas? Not sure if maybe I could edit the script to circumvent this...

And now I'm just stumped. The shear amount of difficulty I'm having getting things working makes me think there's a larger problem underneath, but I really have no idea where to begin looking. If there's any direction you could point me in, perhaps typical mistakes that could cause these issues, I'd be more than grateful for the advice.

Thanks,