guestbook spam

Yes there was another site that only displayed 7 characters but if it still works then let it be, simply change the message about entering the 8 characters.

As to using an image for the background you will find the head section and I believe the <BODY> tag in the templates/header.php file. You can either use the background="image.gif" attibute in the body tag or add

in the style section.

Also, having just browsed your site, I would say that you could easily integrate the guestbook into your current site design. As your site uses the same banner and menu on every page you could make them a single file and have every page call that file using the include function of PHP. Same for the copyright at the bottom. Only having a single file for the menu and banner means it is easier to update as and when necessary. I have given brief instructions elsewhere in this forum and I am in the process of writing a tutorial on it for my site.

Awesome. yeah i have wanted to do the include stuff for awhile.
I'm sure I could do it, but it will take a bit of time for me lol as I don't exactly know too much php.

ok the background image is going, thanks for that.

but with the images for the verfication...even tho it is only displaying 7, it wont accept them, it wants 8 characters entered in.
So is there someway I can change, so that it only accepts 7?
Or is there something I can change to make the 8th image to display.

In the verify.php are all of the 8 numbers set at the start?

Ok, i just went and rescrambled the numbers in verify.php and now there is 8 characters displaying when signing the guestbook, but.....
if u enter in the 8 which are displaying, it does not accept them, for some really odd reason.

have a go at posting a message in the guestbook...
http://alpha.virtualhosting.co.nz/~clowns4h/advguestbook/

thanks for your help.

Carbonize, the same thing happened on another site I visited today. I put in the image code, but it got changed to something else.

The code it gave me here was: 63B28A9B But when I previewed my post, I got the following error message:

The Image Verication code you supplied is incorrect.
Please enter the 8 characters that appear in the image.

I noticed that the above code had been changed to: 94168331 in the text box.

I was wondering if this error might have something to do with where the guestbook is located on the server or other codes they are using. The site I mentioned uses frames. When I got the error I was outside of the frames. A few hours later I went back to that site and had no problem when the frames were loaded. I noticed Phil's guestbook is not in the usual place.

Hmm the code should not change as the code is passed in the post using a hidden tag. Get the latest version of the script from www.carbonize.co.uk/verification.zip and make sure that every instruction was followed, particularly those to do with add.class.php.

ahh well. i might give it 1 more try at redoing it.

Let me know because it is annoying.

it is a very simple fix.. i dont know whether someone already said this, but you can always include the following tag...

umm sorry... no the second part should be

in strict XML, you can just input this in the (head) area..

There is no </meta> tag.

A robots.txt file is preferable to using this tag as it saves having to add it to every page. Most major spiders follow and obey the robots.txt's instructions.

yes it may be useful (the robot txt file) but im sure spammers have already cum up with ways to bypass those sorts of security fixes.

A robots.txt file and the robots meta tag are not meant to stop spammers. Spammers do not have to circumvent these as only search engine spiders pay attention to them. I doubt that most email harvesters even identify themselves with a unique useragent but rather masquerade as IE.

A robots.txt file and the robots meta tag are not meant to stop spammers. Spammers do not have to circumvent these as only search engine spiders pay attention to them. I doubt that most email harvesters even identify themselves with a unique useragent but rather masquerade as IE.

So... Is the only way to stop spam by having a "verify entry" option? It would work I guess, though more spam in my inbox would suck. But I'd rather know about before having to log in to my admin and manually deleting it all the time.

To my knowledge, AG doesn't have a entry verification script/process, does it?