Help with blocking spam

[Don]

I have someone who keeps dumping stuff on my "guestbook" page. It's usually
some sort of sports jargon with urls, etc.
Is there a way to block this from happening? I'm using frontpage 2000.
Also I see that the company I bought my site from offers an "IP" block. It
appears if I enter an IP address or a partial address it will block that
address from accessing my site. I'm just not sure that's how it works or
how I find the IP address of those dumping the stuff on my site.
Can anyone offer a solution?
Thanks,
Don.............

 

[Steve Easton]

Unfortunately that's the nature of the internet.
Don't bother with the IP block for a couple of reasons:
1. For the most part, IP address used by people logging into their ISP
are not static. They change every time the user logs on / starts their computer.

2. Some ISPs ( AOL especially ) use proxy servers, blocking one of their IP address
could block many people from using your guestbook.
( although I don't consider AOL an ISP, I consider it a web site with internet access )

--
Steve Easton
Microsoft MVP FrontPage
FP Cleaner
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/fpclean.htm
Hit Me FP
http://www.95isalive.com/fixes/HitMeFP.htm

 

[Mike Mueller]

The easiest thing to do is to change the url of your
guestbook. Just as google et al find your pages, their are
spam search engines that look for guestbooks and other
forms- and then the spammers use that information and send a
'bot out to fill in as much as it can. Changing the name of
your page will heavily reduce the amount of spam you get.
Once it starts up again, you will want to change the name
again. It may not hurt to do some 'reverse-SEO' of the page
and links to it, maybe use an image of a guestbook (not
named guestbook.gif) instead of a text anchor will slow down
their indexing processes also


:I have someone who keeps dumping stuff on my "guestbook"
page. It's usually
: some sort of sports jargon with urls, etc.
: Is there a way to block this from happening? I'm using
frontpage 2000.
: Also I see that the company I bought my site from offers
an "IP" block. It
: appears if I enter an IP address or a partial address it
will block that
: address from accessing my site. I'm just not sure that's
how it works or
: how I find the IP address of those dumping the stuff on my
site.
: Can anyone offer a solution?
: Thanks,
: Don.............
:
:

 

[don_a]

Hi,

I have been using the Front Page 2003 guestbook function on a web site that
I developed. I have been having problems with spam. I have read the many
messages with suggestions and I have been changing the names of the guestbook
processing page and the guestbook log. It slows the spamming down, but they
have come back before and I expect that they will back again.

Before I read these, I found a Captcha service that offers to protect forms
from spam. There is even a user forum which suggests that this service would
work with FP. It requires modification of a web page on the web server. The
code that I have looks different from what they suggest. I expect that they
are working with an older version.

The form processing code as I have modified it on my web server page looks
like this.

<form method="POST"
action="http://XXXX.gate.YYYY.com/_vti_bin/shtml.exe/GuestBook1.htm"
onSubmit="" name="guestlog"
webbot-action="http://XXXX.gate.YYYY.com/--WEBBOT-SELF--">

where XXXX my unique function number and YYYY is the address of the Captcha
service provider.

It starts out OK, but then I get a request to login as if it is a password
protected
location. It appears to me that .exe part of the string may be causing the
website to want a password.

Do you have any thoughts about whether this could work or how to get it to
work?

Thanks

 

[Windsun]

You are going to a lot of trouble trying to make that (IMO very crappy) FP
guestbook work and considering more addons to stop the spamming.

I would suggest instead that you get one of the several free scripts
available. Try Google for guestbooks php, I see lots of different ones.

And there is no way that the FP guestbook can be made spam proof without a
complete recoding.

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[don_a]

Thanks very much. This is what I was thinking about doing. You confirmed my
next step. Thanks again.