Messages posted by: Carbonize

The spammers find your site using Google or any other major search engine. This is why it's a good idea to block them from viewing the guestbook by using a robots.txt file.

Digressing is fun. Makes a change from the same questions over and over and over ad infinitum.

I wont post my opinion on most Sys admins. But most I have come across have learnt it all in a classroom with no practical experience at all. The IT man for my partners company spent an hour trying to get a printer to work. He played with the settings, resintalled the drivers all for nothing. My partner phones me so I asked her if it was plugged in. Guess what, it wasn't

Mike Zulkoski wrote:BTW, the refusal of the majority of people who use computers to educate their self about their software and their security on the Net is one of the things that make me "Grumpy". Obviously you are not one of them, you are searching for answers.

Better stop . . . I'm about to get started . . . Hmmm, think I'll post something on one of my boards about "lack of education and then whining about the results of lack thereof".

Try sitting on forums like this sometime then. I personally think they should force everyone to sit an exam before they are allowed to own a computer.

From my own experience most hosts only provide Spamassassin. For mail spam I personall use Spamihilator which sits on your computer and intercepts POP3 email as it is downloaded. I find it has a 99% success rate (on here anyway).

Lazarus already has this feature. IF I get time I may write a mod for AG.

As Lazarus is justa fork of the Advanced Guestbook it uses the same database structure. Updating is just a matter of copying te dataabse information from the Advanced Guestbook config.inc.php file to the one in Lazarus then visiting install.php in your web browser and selecting update.

1 - Check that both the tmp and public folders have permissions set to 777 as well as the files they contain.

2 - Check book_data in phpMyAdmin and see if under extra for the ID field is says auto increment.

Only by blocking whole IP blocks which are Russian.

The guestbook wont work that way. You either need to edit the header and footer to match your site or take a look at Lazarus.

Marcoh email me please.

Ok this is getting a bit weird. Looks like somehow they are figuring out the CAPTCHA. I don't have AG here nor do I have it installed as I use Lazarus (for obvious reasons). From the above post I can see they are hitting the guestbook to get the form and are then submitting it complete with CAPTCHA. They have to get the form first for the captcha to have been generated and put into the database. I will look into it if I get time/motiviation.

As to renaming addentry.php rename the file then edit config.inc.php to reflect the change.

You could also stop search engines spidering your guestbook using a robots.txt file.

Weird. A few people have reported an increase in spam. One is now logging the entries and says they are valid inputs (putting captcha in). Could it be one person is so sad as to sit there manually entering captcha or have they wrote a script that guess the captcha. Maybe I will look into it. I doubt they have a script to read CAPTCHA yet as I've not heard of any spam increase in Lazarus. But then AG's CAPTCHA uses the servers time to generate a random sequence.

1 - Yes. I wrote a mod somewhere in this forum. Was it in this thread ? Or was it in an email.

2 - Maybe. Lazarus has several anti spam layers. The cost is how ever long it takes you to download Lazarus, copy the database information over, upload Lazarus and run the update script.

If doing 2 please back up both your database and guestbook files first. better safe than sorry.