guestbook spam

I have been using the Advanced Guestbook 2.3.1 for many months now. I have it set up on several sites I webmaster. I find some "people" will post the same message in all the books, usually something like 'great site'. They post with the sole purpose of advertising their "business" website which is usually in a different language.

The worst are people who leave their porn site and add a javascript in the post to automatically direct you to that site when the guestbook is viewed. Even trying to delete the post in admin will not work unless javascript is turned off in the browser.

I thought I would post here and see if anyone else has received guestbook spam like this? My list of blocked IP's is getting bigger and bigger

Deb

We had the same problem - though I don't think at quite the same level as you. We only had a total of 5 or so. I was able to just block their ip addresses and the problem went away. We never had the javascript problem with ours either - they would just post their site info. Good luck (I know this doesn't "help" - but just wanted you to know you weren't alone!

)

I dont know if this would work or not. But you could allways disable html in your styles settings. That might cure the java problem.

Hi 39 Reasons....thanks for replying

It's been quite calm in my guestbooks for a few days now. Every once in awhile someone makes the rounds through the guestbooks and I follow behind and delete entries

I'm beginning to think these people search out Advanced Guestbooks just to do this sort of 'spamming'. I've seen the same posts in other guestbooks that I don't even own. When I used the Bravenet.com guestbook *shudder*, this sort of posting never occured that I found. It's good to hear from others too about all this as well

Hi JTD....disabling html would probably work so javascript coding couldn't be added to a post. I like having html enabled so visitors can leave their banners and logos. Fortunately it has only happened twice now that my guestbook was taken over by porn, and that I caught it very quickly

BTW....your fudge looks sooooooo yummy!

Deb

Thank you.

Actually My wife makes it. I just do the sites.

I have (or HAD, since I am having to re-do our guestbook) html disabled on our guestbook. Maybe that was the difference. I do allow people to post pictures - so they are able to represent who they are that way (just doesn't link to anything - it's just the photo or logo).

I did a google search for the exact phrase used when these spammers posted - and yes - it does appear that they post that exact message on lots of other guestbooks.

I'm sure it works for them though - one of the guys in the band clicked on their link to see who in Germany thought our site "looks really good and gives great information" - now he gets all kinds of junk mail.

.........did someone say fudge????

39 Reasons wrote:I do allow people to post pictures - so they are able to represent who they are that way (just doesn't link to anything - it's just the photo or logo).

Good idea...I don't have my books set that way, but I will if the porn people come back

39 Reasons wrote:I'm sure it works for them though - one of the guys in the band clicked on their link to see who in Germany thought our site "looks really good and gives great information" - now he gets all kinds of junk mail.

Oh my! I click on the links to see what the site is about, but so far no extra spam. I've turned off the email notice each poster would receive when they sign the book, so maybe that helps

39 Reasons wrote:.........did someone say fudge????

Check out JTD's site...awesome fudge there

Deb

39 Reasons wrote:I did a google search for the exact phrase used when these spammers posted - and yes - it does appear that they post that exact message on lots of other guestbooks. I'm sure it works for them though - one of the guys in the band clicked on their link to see who in Germany thought our site "looks really good and gives great information" - now he gets all kinds of junk mail.

They have to be useing some type of bot i would say. Do you know how to make a robots.txt file to prevent them??? Sample below.

# robots, msnbot

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /gallery
Disallow: /index.html
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /public_html

If you want to learn more about them then you can look at some other sites robot.txt files. Here is one. www.cnn.com/robots.txt or
http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm

Hi JTD,

Thanks for the link to info about the robots.txt file. I've read it and it seems simple enough but I'm new to all this stuff and wanted to make sure first...

If I create the following robots.txt file...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /gbook

...am I right in thinking this will block all robots from just my guestbook directory (my guestbook directory is called gbook). And also, I'm assuming this would be placed in the root directory.

Is it possible to add robots.txt files to a sub-directory. E.g. if I added...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

...to the /gbook directory would this also work?

Many thanks for any advice you can give and apologies if this is a bit basic.

Regards,

Trevor

Excellent idea JTD to use the robots.txt file! Thanks

I was thinking they must be using something to do this too, but never thought to use the robots.txt file.

I would use a trailing slash so the bots are blocked from the whole gbook directory.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /gbook/

I use the robots.txt file to block google from indexing my images. I have it in the main directory, public_html. I don't know if putting the robots.txt into a subdirectory would work or not. I suspect that it might work...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Here is another site to read more about robots.txt....
http://www.searchengineoptimizationpromotion.com/creating-robots-txt.html

Now it's time to go fix up my robots.txt file!

Deb

You cant place a / at the end.

This one is incorrect
User-agent: *
Disallow: /gbook/

While this one is correct.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /gbook

Also if you will go to the one tutorial link I gave everyone it has a test feature to see if you have your txt file set up correctly.

PS. Hey admin or mod. Why isnt my sig working correctly now? This is how i have allways had it formatted in my profile. Me thinks the forums are having a problem with img code.

From the link you shared JTD, I read this.....

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/

so using this would be the right way...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /gbook/

From the link I shared, another example.....

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/

I ran my http://dreamworkdesigns.com/robots.txt through the validator and it checked out okay

Deb

Well maybe its because you are being generic in your bot terms. It wouldnt let me do it since I mentioned a specfic bot.

# robots, msnbot

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /gallery
Disallow: /index.html
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /public_html

If I added the backslash at the end it rejected mine.

OOPS

above post is me.

I see what you mean now....just a guess here, maybe using the trailing slash was rejected because of your subdomains or your gallery directory, images directory, cgi-bin directory and index.html are all inside your public_html directory?

Deb