Need some website help...

[conorsmom2000]

Any web guru's here? :blush:

My family has a website for the 5k walk for Organ donation we do in memory of our Mom. This past year, we changed the domain name (because it used to be a walk and run, and now it's just a walk) and revamped the site. Suddenly we are having a huge issue with spam in the guestbook - we never had this in the prior 4 years. But, now we are getting a few spam entries almost every day. This is a new guestbook (I don't think there is a link to the old one on there) and I believe it's just set up through Frontpage, which is how my brother did the whole website. I will say that as the walk has grown, more info about it is on the web (I can google MAA's walk and many things come up) but I don't know if that's why this is now happening.

Is there anything we can do to crack down on this? I would hate to have to get rid of the guestbook but some of things that get posted are completely inappropriate and we're getting tired of cleaning it out every day. Is there a "safer" way to have a guestbook?

Thanks! :mickey:

[DizneyRox]

Image verification works well...

You post a random image containing text which can't be figured out via OCR, and have the user input that when they submit. It is verified BEFORE the entry is accepted. That tends to keep the spam entries to a minimum. You won't stop real people from doing things, but the bots have a hard time with it.

You may also be able to opt for a moderated guestbook where entries need to be approved before they display. Still need to manually weed through the bad posts, but at least folks won't see the inappropriate ones.

[CAS]

I second the image verification. It's a lot friendlier for the front end user to type in a few digits than it is to have postings "approved" and it saves time for you. If this is something visitors don't need to log in to participate in then image verification would be my verdict.

[conorsmom2000]

Thanks so much to both of you - I should mention that I'm not really that technical, and I'm not really sure if this is something that you could answer for me - but is the imagie verification something we should be able to do through Frontpage or do we need to go another route for that?

Thanks again! :mickey:

[DizneyRox]

I'm guessing that you might be able to fake some sort of image verification within something like Frontpage (client side), and it might be possible that Frontpage extensions allow you to do something like that. For true image verification you would need to generate random images and be able to validate against them server side. You can pull a Sirius and generate a set number of images with known names and and then you can fake autentication that way, but people MAY quickly figure out what you're doing and program around that. Sounds like you are small potatoes so to speak so the effort might not really be worth it for them to bother. You probably just need to stop people from submitting without passing some authentication. You can maybe even accomplish this by generating a random string client side, have the user input that string, and just do some client side validation against it before they submit. Make sure the javascript does the submission as well, otherwise they can bypass that by just disabling javascript.

Normally I use something akin to Notepad for web page development, or I'm using Visual Studio for my .Net work. Never was a fan of Frontpage, it always seemed to think it knew what I wanted to do, which was almost 100% of the time the exact opposite of what I really did want to do.

[conorsmom2000]

Never was a fan of Frontpage, it always seemed to think it knew what I wanted to do, which was almost 100% of the time the exact opposite of what I really did want to do.

Unfortunately, we learned that too late. :blush: When we first started the web site 4 years ago, we knew nothing about it so my brother just bought Frontpage because he'd heard about it. He never really liked using it though. Recently we both took a very basic web design class (very basic!) where part of what we learned was the different options out there, and Frontpage was at the bottom of the list, and now we really understand why. At some point we'll go with something different, but just to be up and running, we stuck with it since the event is 2 months away.

Thanks again for all your help - I'm going to forward this info to my brother and see what he can work out! :thumbsup: