Advanced Guestbook - Markus Wepfer

Hi

I've been using your Advanced Guestbook for many years. It's an excellent
tool, easy to administer and to handle. For a couple of month though, my
guestbook was being spammed with tons of entries from people who haven't
even visited the mainpage. A google search proved that the same comment is
being transmitted to hundreds of webpages by the same person within a short
amount of time.

This encouraged me to add even more security features to Advanced Guestbook,
such as:
- autoban: automatically ban ip-addresses that have posted more than a
certain number of messages
- check messages for similarity (I don't want to see the same text all the
time)
- allow only a certain limit of messages per day
- enforce loading of message form (as in version 2.3.4); plus enforce a
certain delay time between form display and posting of message
- logging of message flow (accepted and rejected messages) with optional
email notification

All these new features can easily be maintained via the admin interface.
They reduced the amount of spam in my board (www.freerelationshipadvice.com)
by more than 90%

As I think these enhancements can be helpful to other webmasters also, I
would like to share my version (named as 2.5.0) with you.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Regards
Markus Wepfer

http://www.proxy2.de/files/mw_guestbook.zip

Hate to say this but none of his mods actually stop spam until after the fact. I just looked at his guestbook and the last three entries are spam - http://www.freerelationshipadvice.com/guestbook/index.php there are two other spam entries on the first page (at this precise moment).

I've coded a simple approve feature into my guestbook, if anyone is interested (fishkiss.ca).

It just simply blocks entries from being displayed on the guestbook until I go into the admin panel, and approve them using the Easy Admin.

This helps prevent your last few entries (or any of them for that matter) from being spam.

webmaster@fishkiss.ca

balleyne wrote:I've coded a simple approve feature into my guestbook, if anyone is interested (fishkiss.ca).

It just simply blocks entries from being displayed on the guestbook until I go into the admin panel, and approve them using the Easy Admin.

This helps prevent your last few entries (or any of them for that matter) from being spam.

webmaster@fishkiss.ca

And is that supposed to be new? Carbs Lazarus Guestbook already has this feature.

Good point.

I applied the mod a few days ago but still get spam. guestbook 2.3.1

Not only that but I am not even getting the email notification anymore when someone post.

Any help appreciated.

-------------------

Never mind I found my answer. You said you never wrote one.

Thanks
Dave

drdave wrote:I applied the mod a few days ago but still get spam. guestbook 2.3.1

Not only that but I am not even getting the email notification anymore when someone post.

Any help appreciated.

I could not find it.

-------------------

Never mind I found my answer. You said you never wrote one.

Thanks
Dave

Why dont you just upgrade to Lazarus. That will save all the headaches.

Yes been thinking about it.

When I have some time I think I will.

My GuestBook is not that active so I am sure there will be mostly spam in the meantime so I can always use the admin approval feature. A good fishing net to delete all that garbage.

Thanks
Dave

I'm new to this gestbook therefore I will need a lot of help from many of you. I too is getting a lot of spam on my guestbook. How do I get the Admin Approval Feature installed? Any help is appreciated.

It is built into lazarus. Dont know about advanced guestbook. I dont use AVG.

hi

I thought by removing the URL cell this would deter people bothering to spam (as all they want to do is leave their URL so they get some hits)
but frustratingly most of these morons can still leave their URL??!! how do they do it? because i can't leave mine if i try.
Anyhow, is there anti-spam code out there that can sit within 'guestbook' to block all this shite we receive?

wayne (UK)

1 - You only removed the url input from the form it can still be sent to the guestbook. You would have to remove the url stuff from addclass.php

2 - Read the very first thread of the Advanced Guestbook forum.

Carb, yer the man!
i eventually saw those earlier threads and visited your site for the bot mod.

hassle free, mods went in relatively straight forward for a novice like me. it's only been 24hrs odd but already my guestbook has gone from 4 to 5 spam entries a day to NONE (so far) it's looking good mate.

sincerely, thank you very much!

wayne

I modified the guestbook so that messages containing the censor words are blocked. Offcourse you have to make a good list of censorwords, but it helps a lot! It checks the words in the url/email and message fields. I also added a banip option in the easy admin tab so that i don't need to copy paste the whole time. For this to work i also had to replace the host adress with the real ip from the spammer.

Yes your first mod is somethign I am adding to Lazarus for version 1.6 by request. The second is something I already have in Lazarus but I made Lazarus store both IP and Hostname.