Webmaster vs. Spammers: A guestbook story. - FTPplanet.com Discussions


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Author	Topic: Webmaster vs. Spammers: A guestbook story.
ken13 unregistered	posted 01-29-2006 01:19 PM There is very useful servise: http://www.protectwebform.com/ Try it. May be it will help.
ququ Senior Member	posted 08-12-2005 12:07 PM Spam deleted. [This message has been edited by Van K (edited 08-12-2005).]
harshfie Junior Member	posted 10-18-2003 11:06 AM Thanks everyone for the comments. Yes, like others suggest, I have my email address hardcoded into the script. My email is not getting spammed at all (currently!). Only the guest page. Now that the guestpage has moved and is not being indexed by search engines, it hasn't yet been found. They might find it, sure, but the real name is not actually GUESTX. That was an example. JDH
kilgore trout unregistered	posted 10-18-2003 10:20 AM Harshfie, I agree that e-mail addresses in the HTML code are probably causing your guestbook spam, specifically in the guestbook form page. You changed GUEST to GUESTX but that doesn't stop them searching for substring GUEST . I use Matt's Formmail on my site but I have hacked it so that my e-mail address is hard-coded in the CGI script. It is renamed without "form" in the name. The html form has a bogus "recipient". No spam. Good luck. ---John
MrUser Senior Member	posted 10-17-2003 10:34 AM Robots.txt will keep the search engines from indexing certain pages. But it won't stop spam. There are other ways someone can crawl your site and log e-mail addresses. Your best bet is to not have e-mail addresses in your code but have them instead in your cgi script or whatever type of script you are running. Another solution is use the service on this site http://www.postfixgate.com/ it is user supported and addresses the issue by maintaining a database of spammers that you can use to block ips and domains that are troublesome. There are other lists out there but you have to be careful because some or so strict it could block domains that valid traffic could come from. THe idea about typing letters above the box is good but like I said if your e-mail address is listed some where in the code a determined spammer can still get it. It's not the posting that is the problem.
Abdullah21 unregistered	posted 10-17-2003 09:03 AM Here's another idea.. use one of those image thingys that says "please type in the letters above this box" Abdullah www.lightuponlight.com
pdbeugeling Moderator	posted 09-27-2003 12:39 PM I think this thread should have been in the WEBMASTERS BOARD but in anycase this is a great article....for futher reading on ROBOTS.TXT may I suggest the following Web Robots are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Some people call them Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders. These pages have further information about these Web Robots The Web Robots Pages The robots.txt file should be created in Unix line ender mode! Most good text editors will have a Unix mode or your FTP client should do the conversion for you. Do not attempt to use an HTML editor that does not specifically have a text mode to create a robots.txt file. Robots.txt File Tutorial This robots.txt syntax checker checks the contents of a site's robots.txt against that contained in the latest specification, along with providing warnings on the use of new features that are not yet widely deployed. Robots.txt Syntax Checker [This message has been edited by pdbeugeling (edited 09-27-2003).]
harshfie Junior Member	posted 09-27-2003 10:26 AM tips: Here is an idea for people maintaining a website with spam problems. Ive been maintaining a website for my church, and Ive recently been dismayed to find the guestbook filled with spam, ads, and quite disgusting trash (I dont need to be specific; Im sure youve seen this stuff in your email). I had gone to quite a lot of trouble to learn perl for the guestbook, so I wasnt easily convinced to discard the guestbook concept. The guestbook does garner really valid and useful comments at times. I first tried a few ideas like suppressing the ability for a guestbook writer to add his website URL. These ideas didnt work. Finally I moved the page by copying the file from, for example, GUEST.HTM to GUESTX.HTM. I changed all the pointers on the other pages to GUESTX.HTM. Nevertheless, I found that the old guestbook was still receiving spam. New and valid comments continued on the new page. This made me realize that the spammers were coming to my guestbook directly, without using my hyperlinks. They were not just finding the guestbook in the normal way. It caused me to attempt to put myself into the mind of such spammers. I realized that if I wanted to do such an unkind thing, I would use a search engines and to find the guestbooks. Tada! I have now attempted to avoid letting search engines find my guestbook by using the features of a file entitled ROBOTS.TXT. I include this file on my website to discourage search engines from listing my guestbook. True visitors to my site, however, can find the guestbook easily. Here is what I use in ROBOTS.TXT. Perhaps you can use the concept to help your sites too. I actually used lower case for the filename, but upper case in this narrative to make it stand out. User-agent: * Disallow: /guest/ Disallow: /guest.log [This message has been edited by harshfie (edited 10-14-2003).] [This message has been edited by harshfie (edited 10-14-2003).]

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