Hey

Ive got a couple of sites with guestbooks that allow guests to leave a message for whoever may look. No one has to register or do anything before they can leave a message which means i get LOADS of automatic submissions with links to various websites that i dont want to have on these sites.

My question is this: is there a way to stop, or at least reduce, the number of these automatic submissions?

Any help would be appreciated - i just deleted 138 pages of them on one site and by the time i reloaded the page there was another one!!!

-Stoot

If you mean spamming I had the the very same problem a while back with my guestbook. It was a nightmare.

one solution is to have one field that you ask the person to enter a number using javascript. I've seen that a few times. The javascript checks to make sure it's numbers only. I now have something simlar on my site.

this site offers a tutorial on adding javascript form validation. - http://www.tizag.com/javascriptT/javascriptform.php

Either that or only let users post. Do a search for captcha images in google

Thanks a lot for the replies. Ive added a Captcha feature to the guestbook so hopefully that will stem the flow of spam nonsense in there...

Cheers
-Stoot

Originally Posted by stoot98

Thanks a lot for the replies. Ive added a Captcha feature to the guestbook so hopefully that will stem the flow of spam nonsense in there...

Cheers
-Stoot

good for you, captcha will stop automated entries, but will not stop actuall people from spamming your guestbooks. I have captcha and I still get 5 or so a day, and theses links that are posted are disgusting.

I am also seeking a solution, my idea is a drastic one, I want to deny access to this web site from anyone who does not live in my part of the world. Does anyone have an idea how I could do that?

My next step is to remove the guestbook, and I would rather not do that.

I want to deny access to this web site from anyone who does not live in my part of the world. Does anyone have an idea how I could do that

Check the IP against a known list of your countries IP
http://software77.net/cgi-bin/ip-country/geo-ip.pl
http://www.ip2location.com/

Other measures you can take,

1/ Check the referrer to the page. It it's blank or not from your site discard the data

2/ Do not use standard names for the fields.

3/ Change the names of the fields on a regular basis.

4/ have a hidden field that stores a random number.

5/ Write some code to use random names each time the form is called (pretty foolproof this one)