How to prevent guestbook spam on your website

Preventing spam on your website's guestbook is doable and requires just a few tweaks to your website's guestbook settings. These tips also work excellently on social networking sites such as MySpace, where your 'guestbook' is your comments page. Most sites where you can set up a guestbook or allow comments to be posted allow the administrator (that would be you) to change the settings to minimize the amount of spam that ends up posted.

The easiest way to prevent spam on your website's comments page or guestbook is to moderate all messages that are being submitted for posting. Many sites will allow you to set this option under the settings page and basically you'll receive an e-mail or notification every time someone submits a post or comment. You'll have to log in and view the comment or post and then determine if you want to allow the comment to be posted. This takes away a bit of the real time aspect of posting guestbook messages and comment, but it will keep your page cleaner and spam free. You'll get to screen every comment before it is ever seen.

Another way to prevent spam from being posted is to require the poster to fill out a CAPTCHA challenge question. The most common CAPTCHA formats are simply a string of numbers or letters embedded in an image. The letters and numbers are designed in such a way that makes it near impossible for an automated system or computer to read them. Therefore only a live person can accurately read the sequence of numbers and letters. The CAPTCHA form usually has an input box where the poster has to enter in order the string of numbers and letters in the image. If done correctly; the comment is posted. This effectively stops most spam messages from being posted as most are generated and posted by computers but it won't stop those spammers who manually take the time to post messages.

In the earlier days of guestbook entries and website comments, website owners used to have to go in and view all the already posted entries then manually delete each spam message. This meant that the spam was already out there and potentially being viewed by the website's visitors. It also meant that legitimate messages could end up buried under pages and pages of spam if the website owner didn't check it daily.

Now many sites allow the user to customize the settings so that a comment or post has to be approved personally by them before going live or the poster has to be an actual human being in order to submit the comment. Some sites will allow you to set up both a CAPTCHA and allow you to moderate the comments before they go live. Usually though one of these two options is sufficient. On sites that require accounts and log-in screens before people can post, you can usually limit who is allowed to post such as allowing only those on a 'friend list' to post or certain usernames to have posting abilities.

Spam will continue to evolve and flood our online lives, but with small tweaks to your guestbook or comments page you can minimize the amount of spam that junks up your websites.