Defeat the spammers

I have had to insert some meta tags to stop the search engines from indexing my guestbook because of the amount of halfwits using it to advertise porn and sites offering enlargement services.
I thought some others that are getting spammed may be interested.

In templates/header.php
Insert:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1" />
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache" />

I had this problem so I had a friend write an image verification script to prevent bots from posting in the guestbook.

Also you would probably find a robots.txt file better than the meta tags.

Carbonize wrote:I had this problem so I had a friend write an image verification script to prevent bots from posting in the guestbook.
Also you would probably find a robots.txt file better than the meta tags.

Using a robots.txt file does not prevent the human spammer from typing 'Guestbook' into Google and then vsiting each of the results and posting spam intot haose guestbooks.
Those are the type of brain dead spammers I was suggesting a way of preventing by stopping the search pages from indexing the guestbook.

that might only account for 1% of all spammers, because that method is so time consumming...........however, I did change some key words in guestbook... because if you do a key word search for certain things that are relevant to advanced guestbook, it shows hundreds of them in google.....I changed most of these key words............it makes it much harder for the human spammer to find my guestbook now if they do a google search or something... If he is a repeat customer.....I simply ban them through htaccess at the root level.

Most just do a search on google like this - http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22Advanced+Guestbook+2.3.1%22&meta= and then use a script or program to go through the list posting entries. This is why I removed the advert from the bottom then changed my guestbooks URL. The image verification script was just a challenge for my friend but works fine.

Carbonize wrote:I had this problem so I had a friend write an image verification script to prevent bots from posting in the guestbook.

Also you would probably find a robots.txt file better than the meta tags.

HiYa.....

What would the equvilent entries be in the robots.txt file and in which folder of the "guestbook" folder structure would one put it?

Thanks for your time.... James

A robots.txt file goes in the root folder of your web site. http://www.google.com/search?q=robots.txt should get you the info you require on the format.

I've defeated a large number of spam by implementing ban words. I don't allow words that are often in guestbook spam like enlargement, mortgage, the naughty words, and also domain extensions such as .com .net .biz, etc. This has frustrated and detered most spammers from my guestbook sites.