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Posted

I don’t really use Guest books but I thought I would play around with the one in cPanel. I had noticed in my reading that many people were getting a lot of SPAM from bots in their Advanced GuestBook program.

 

I did a little research and found a solution that should reduce the amount of SPAM that you will get. It will not eliminate it but should reduce it. I found a site that uses image verification as a means to prevent auto spamming.

 

You can find it at http://www.carbonize.co.uk/Board/viewforum.php?f=10

 

I have run this and it is working. For those that are interested and have not heavily modified their AG, I would be happy to assist in working with you to set this up should you want to use it and have trouble installing it.

Posted

I was having spam problems with AG and installed the image verification about 2 weeks ago. Not one spam post since. It does work. Installation is fairly straight forward if you have any experience at modding guestbooks or forums.

Posted

I may take you up on that help later when I'm a bit more coherent. :dance: Been up since 4:30am due to family member having surgery. I don't get a ton of spam, but I'd like to eliminate as much as possible.

 

Thanks!

Posted

Yes, there is no gb_book. I have notified the author. By the way, for those that want this but arent comfortable modifying their code for the image verification, I have the changed pages available and I can email them to you. Then all you have to do is overwrite those on your server.

  • 1 month later...
Posted

OK I have actually updated my simple anti spam method. I switched from my image verification to the simple method seven days ago and have so far stopped 52 attempted spam postings (I have had it saving spam entries into private messages)

 

You can find instructions for my simple anti spam method for both Advanced Guestbook 2.2. and 2.3.1 at http://carbonize.co.uk/Board/viewtopic.php?t=69.

 

I came up with the simple version as I wanted a method that was invisible to real users and image verification had some problems as well as requiring GD to be supplied.

Posted
I have run this and it is working.  For those that are interested and have not heavily modified their AG, I would be happy to assist in working with you to set this up should you want to use it and have trouble installing it.

 

hi rob,

 

i just implemented your modification into our guestbook, so i cannot say if it is working or not. what i can say though is, that i do very much appreciate the way you explained the mods, so that even a coding illiterate (which i am)could manage to do it. as i do not have the slightest idea what the changes in the code actually do, i would like to ask you to give me some basic explanation of how spambots spam guestbooks and why your mod prevents them to do so. i am just asking out of curiosity, so if you don't want to explain that in public, that's fine with me. in any case, thank you very much for your effort.

 

best gun

Posted

The question of whether or not my anti spam measures were working is why I made my guestbook store all entries that got classes as spam in the private message table. Last Saturday I switched from the image verification system to the simple anti spam system and told it to start saving the spam entries. Seven days have no past and I have logged over 60 attempted spam entries. They all appear to have come from the same worm/virus as the ICQ number is always the same. I say worm because the posts alway come from different IP's.

 

Anyway forms such as the guestbook work by sending the forms information to the script. The information is sent as variable=data. If you look at the url at the top you can see an example of this in action. The spam works by just sending the information straight to the script. Image verification stops it because the required variable will be missing or wrong. My simple anti spam method works by changing the name of one of the variables thus stopping the script from accepting the data.

Posted

Yay I'm moving to TC as soon as the DNS for my domain has been changed and spread. With my site I bring goodies. goodies beign The db Guestbook which is Advanced Guestbook 2.3.1 overhauled and updated. Added MSN/Yahoo fields, simple anti spam, store posters IP or hostname, smilies in comments, smileys on comments form, disable private messaging, alt tags in smileys, all known exploits patched, logging out of admin takes you back to guestbook, etc etc.

 

To come:

- Option to have posts require admin moderation before appearing in guestbook

- Change $session as apparently it is reserved by Apache2 by default.

- Anything else that comes to mind.

Posted

Sounds like Carbonize has swallowed a few PHP books...Welcome to the forums and Rob......please email me the mod'd pages for version 2.3.1, your're the man in advance.

Posted
Sounds like Carbonize has swallowed a few PHP books...Welcome to the forums and Rob......please email me the mod'd pages for version 2.3.1, your're the man in advance.

I'm a helper on the Advanced Guestbook forum and got fed up of people asking for modifications and fixes. All the modifications I have written for the guestbook are available from my forum or http://www.carbonize.co.uk/AG.

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