PHP Advanced Guestbook

[rdprecin]

Hi, love the idea of having a forum for Siteground members, but it seems somewhat redundant that you have no specific Helpdesk or Troubleshooting forum. I know i can go and chat live to staff, but it'd surely be alot healthier to have public discussion, so that problems can be referenced later.

Anyway....that's not what i'm posting about right now.

I installed Advanced Guestbook on my site, and configured it to match. However as of a month ago i've started recieving spam messages daily. Sometimes up to 40 a day. Just random users with random IP's posting a message load of links to presumably porn sites. I figure that perhaps it's a bot of some kind, because when i turned coding off, the spam continues, but of course now they aren't links, they're just text with the url code around them. Is there anyway to discourage, or prevent this spam? Has anyone else found this problem? It's getting somewhat annoying to delete 40 messages a day from my guestbook, and all the crap discourages legitimate posters.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Tom]

Well, the only thing that came through my mind is to have your Guestbook a little bit changed, so these bots will not be able to automatically post to your guestbook, as it will be a little bit different than the original Guestbook.

As I am not a web developer, I am not sure how this can be done, but I am sure one of our web developers will help you with that.

Therefore, I will move the topic to 'other development topics' :)

[jack]

Hi,

The solution is to modify a bit your guestbook so that the bots will not be able to automatically post in it. Just add something unique in the form (a hidden input field) where a guestbook entry is made. Then modify the source code of the guestbook to check if the hidden field is present before adding the entry. It shoud be very simple to implement.

If you do not have any experience in programming just write back to us and we will find a way to help you.

[embudu]

Hiya,

You can use .htaccess. Once you find out the IP address you can block that address. You van find more about this in some mambo forums like I did.

[miguel]

Once you find out the IP address you can block that address.

We though about different kinds of IP blocking, but none of them would do, since

Just random users with random IP's posting a message...

[rdprecin]

Thanks so much for the help guys, i'll give your suggestions a try.


And thanks for adding the dev forums, good plan!

Glenn

[ukapolog]

Yes, I have only had two guestbooks running for a month and they are already being targetted by these crooks!
I have already blocked several IP addresses but then others seem to come along.
I think it is the php part of the URL which these people must go looking for since neither of my pages have 'guestbook' as part of their URL. Somebody said just add .htaccess - where does one add that?? Help please??

Robin

[jack]

Using .htaccess you can ban IPs, host or whole subnets. But I think it would not be useful against such kind of spam bots.

Here (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/howto/htaccess.html) is the official tutorial from the apache group that explains .htaccess in details. However there are multiple sources explaining how it should be used. Just type what you want to do and .htaccess in google :) and it will come up with the results.

So in general to finaly answer your question ;) You should put it in the directory where you wish it to operate.

You can also ask our support team by the ticketing system to assist you in creating this file.

[neednam]

Email Spammers IP Blacklist :
http://www.email-policy.com/Spam-black-lists.htm