People have been spamming my guestbook for some time now.
At first I just deleted all the advertising stuff, all the indecent stuff and all the completely random stuff.
Then when it got to a couple of those per day, I started banning their email addresses, since 50% of the spamming was just a handful of people spamming over and over again.
Then when it got to sometimes up to ten a day, I changed my guestbook, every entry is added to an invisible guestbook, and only if there is a genuine entry, I copy and paste it to my real guestbook, so the entries are not visible straight away - but I'd rather have it this way than have all the indecent entries visible straight away too.

However, I set it up so that I always get a copy in my hotmail box when someone signs the guestbook.
Now hotmail decides something is spam if it's sent to more than one person. And I often get guestbook entries in my junkmail box (but not always).
Which makes me believe (but I could be wrong) that they have some way of signing guestbooks automatically?
Do they have spybots that find out where to sign my guestbook and dump all the garbage in there?
How on earth do they set that up?
Is it just me or has everyone's guestbook been spammed for the last 6 months or so?

So does anyone know how they do it? Are there real people out there spamming my guestbook or did my guestbook url end up on someone's spamlist and is it all done automatically?
Would it help if I occasionally change the url to my guestbook?
It's a lot of work to change the link on every page (that website was set up four years ago, so changing the links is not done automatically), but at least I would be rid of those evil spammers for a while - or would I? How long would it take them to find out my new URL and add that to their spamlist?
It's driving me nuts!

And I wonder, how much do they get paid to annoy the heck out of me and probably lots of other people too?

i am thinking it must be an "in person" thing. having an auto program to detect the specific fields to enter and such for any given guestbook script would probably be a lot of bothersome work.

you musta cheezed someone off pretty bad.

you musta cheezed someone off pretty bad.
Do you really think so?
If it's something personal, why would they bother to keep on spamming me? I changed the protocol at least 6 weeks ago so there's no longer any point, but yet they keep at it.
It seems pretty random, they're trying to sell stuff on my guestbook most of the time.
So am I the only one whose guestbook is being spammed? I figured it was a new annoying trend or whatever.

what guesbook service do you use? mine isn't being spammed, but it was for a while maybe half a year ago.. someone kept spamming and leaving links to gross websites. they would leave like 20 messages at a time.. and every time i'd check my guestbook, there would be new ones there, so it was really bothersome to have to delete them all. they just stopped after a while, though.. i hope your person stops soon :(

I'd just get rid of the guestbook all together, and then get a new one. Maybe you could buy one like by a service usually they are more protective over spam?

I must be like the cases where blog comments are being spammed,

Basically one way of making your website popular (appear with a good ranking on major search engines such as google), you have to have many site having links to your (xxx stuffs, gambling, fake rolex, etc.) website. So where is the best place to "submit" links? I think many of them think blog comment spamming is quite a good idea. - From Nickpan.com

http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/

doesn't starlet have that blog comment spam thing going on? i often see as top comment "poker" things etc.

Love,
Mirna

Yeah it's all bots. My blog comments get about 20+ a day at the moment..i gave up deleting them. And my megabook was getting spammed so i simply removed it, it was bad enough having to remove them from my blog all the time, i wasnt about to start deleting from my gbook too!

Changing the location of your guestbook will work....but it'll only be a matter of weeks, if not days before they find it again. Once you are on their radar, you cant get off it basically!

Theres people all over the net right now trying to work out ways to stop them, smart people, but so far everything they have come up with...the bots have found a way around!

Its truly annoying...and i hate myself for having given up on deleting them (because thats what they want, like avy said...its all about getting a good google ranking so if you DONT delete them thats what they get!) but i really cant be bothered any more.

you musta cheezed someone off pretty bad.

I doubt. Just about anyone who has a blog that can recieve spam from programs or something, suffers from it.

Just a few days ago, I had about 96 comments in my blog all for poker! I left my blog for JUST A DAY and returned to this. Luckily for me, I could just go into the mysql admin, order the comments by name or id, select, and hit delete (only took about two minutes). I checked my logs, and my comments page were accessed directly (not from my site or somewhere else). One suggestion is to change the location of my comments page every now and then, but this would require editing other files, and I don't have that time.

At first, all of the spam contained at least 10 links per post, so I added a hack to only disallow and comments with more than one link per post. That stopped that type of spam, but the ones I get now (like the 96+ posts one) only have one link. Most of the spam is placed on old comments, but I really don't feel like adding the hack to close comments on old posts (too much file editing).

I also read that you can add a hack to require the poster to preview their post before submitting, but I'm worried this will lower the amount of comments I recieve (I've "submitted" forms before and didn't notice it was simply a preview of what I WANTED to send).

I created a post not to long ago (here at LEIA) to see if there was something I could add so that my comments page could only be accessed if it was called upon from an area of my site, so I'm going to see what's going on with that :D

I got the poker ads too. And I'm glad I'm not the only one... I guess. It never seemed like it was directed to me personally.
I set up the guestbook from a tutorial, with flash and php, and I'm kind of attached to it.
Would it help to change the name of the directory (and obviously all the relative links on my website) AND add that script to keep robots out of my guestbook directory? Or does that only work on search bots like google?

I know how you feel, I love my blog and I don't want to switch to something else...

I've read more than once that changing the name of the directory will SLOW the spam down, but not stop it. I've done it before (well, on accident, I had messed up my blog and reinstalled it in a new location) and it stopped for a bit... I believe you can use the robots.txt to keep some of the bots out of your guestbook. When I got the phpbb forum, I was given a robots.txt file to use. It blocks out bots known to cause spam, attacks, etc. And it does sound like a good idea not to allow anything to crawl that particular directory of yours. :D Good luck (to all of us).

I've been getting loads too, i took my blog offline until they quit..for now. I went to phpmyadmin thing and deleted there but it was one entry at a time...i have 300+ to delete :(

Rosey, I'm not sure how your phpmyadmin is set up, but if the spammer used the same name in most of the posts, you can just sort the comments by name and click "check all". Then you can do a quick look through the checked list to make sure you didn't click and valid comments to delete. There's a red "X" at the bottom of the list which will click all selected items displayed on the page. 300+? :( Sorry. I know I would be up to about that if I didn't check my comments almost on a daily basis.

Well I do check, i have it set up to email me when someone posts..this all happened on one day...grrr!
The way one is set up, I can sort it but there are no boxes to check to select more than one. But at least I can sort it.
I saw a few ips that kept coming back so I banned them, for the little good that will do.

I think I'll keep it as it is for now, I don't get that many genuine guestbook entries anyway, and now that all entries go into a 'shadow guestbook', I don't have to watch it like a hawk. If I spend time changing all the links etc. and they still find a way to spam me, it will only be frustrating.
I definitely know now that I'll NOT be adding a tagboard to any of my pages that are accessible to anyone, just on a couple of pages that are not listed anywhere and that are only visited by friends and relatives.

I can't help but wonder though, does it really pay off for them to be so annoying? I can't see anyone going and buy phonecards or play poker, or do x-rated stuff just because someone has been spamming their guestbook or tagboard - it really doesn't make much sense.