When Guestbooks go bad
A few of our customers websites have Guestbooks. More so in the past but a few still have them now. Im quite fond of them but not for the usual reasons, I enjoy combating the spam that they attract.
Preventing web forms from displaying spam is a challenge I enjoy. I dislike CAPTCHAs, I believe that any legitimate person filling out a form of any kind on a website shouldn’t have to jump through loops of any kind. That is what a computer is for, to jump through those loops for us. I don’t think owners should have to moderate the messages either.
Guestbooks are interesting because their contents could be immediately displayed on a users site. Garbled or embarrassing messages could end up on your site and a potential customer may see it before you do.
I can’t imagine it does your site any favors either if Google or some other search engine spiders see it. For these reasons some customers removed their guestbooks, only a few still use them.
I know Guestbooks can seem a little cheesy, like something from 1980’s. Some of our sites still find value in them. It can allow users to leave comments about your site, product or services. It can often be useful feedback or a nudge if you are doing something badly. They give new and original content to your site too, Google loves that.
Comments on blogs and user reviews on sites like Loudervoice are very important, they give informed and real feedback. I’d like web sites to bring back the guestbook.
To do this though, they’d need to be sure that a guestbook won’t add to their emails, they won’t want to be moderating guestbook entries every morning. I continue to learn but I’ve had great success in looking after these kinds of forms using a range of techniques. Any sites out there having this kind of trouble, I’d like to help.
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