Guestbook Spam

[snowflakes4u]

I don't know whether this is a good topic for this area or not.

I have several children's craft sites and currently use Big Sam's Guestbook.

Over the past year I've had to purge entries three or four times a week from a creep calling himself bot1 or bo[at]go.com as well as several other aliases.

Of course the emails he uses are phony. I can never pick up any other email or IP address through mailwasher.

Tonight I perused the internet and discovered he is quite prolific and has entries in virtually every Sam's Guestbook that Google found. The postings are always rows and rows of links to drug, gambling, porn sites etc.

Probably in other guestbooks as well (not just Sams). Can anything be done?

Snowflake

http://www.papersnowflakes.com

[Wazoo]

Technically, it appears that support for the actual product would start at http://bigsam.gezzed.net/ ... though it appears that they can't handle their own incoming spam ... suggesting that one subscribe to a YahooGroup thing (which has its own issues) ...

I can't quite fathom your attempted connection of a guestbook entry and the MailWasher application ...????

I visited your signature URL but saw no reference to a guestbook (though noting, that time spent was short ... way to many liberties taken at trying to manipulate my browser ...)

If you don't have data captured with this application as to where the posts are coming from, then you'd need access to the server logs ... based on data gleaned there, it's possible that a .htaccess entry could be made ... however, the suggestion that the postings are all over, possibly running as a bot output, it wouldn't be to hard to imagine that there's more to the game .... bottom line, much more data would be required to try to come up with a solution ....

Reading throuugh the docs on this thing, it doesn't look like it captures much data .. yet, being a PHP scri_pt, it shouldn't be that hard to add in a few lines of code .... on the other hand, the instructions do state that one can rename the file to anything .. so what are the odds that your guestbook scripts are still reflecting the file name of "bigsam.php" thus making it easy for a bot to find all these 'free and easy' guestbooks????

And noting further that one of the "features" of a recent Development version includes "Checks HTTP_REFERER to avoid spam messages" so it would appear that they are aware of the fact that not all net users are trustworthy <g> Time to update?