Help with webpage

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Our church has recently gone live with a webpage. We are using pre-installed templates from our web host for the different pages of our site. The one page we are having problems with is the guestbook. We must constantly monitor this page for spam. Our web host says the only way to prevent this is to create a page with verification done in WordPress or something similar. Can anyone point me a website that we can use to learn to do this? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

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I used to use Bravenet http://www.braveapps.com/

I haven’t used it in years so I can’t tell you if it’s still free or any other info about it but you can check it out.

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Akismet may be free for your use.
http://akismet.com/

cheers, Paul

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You can use wordpress directly, go to wordpress.com and read their FAQ’s. If your webhost does not allow you to use wordpress on your pages then you might have to work with it on their website. They have Akismet which catches spam, and tells you they have caught spam and you can then look at what it shows and deal with accordingly. It does not get on your pages unless you approve it.

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Here’s a good guestbook I’ve been using for a few years.

http://www.phpjunkyard.com/php-guestbook-script.php

It has security features that you don’t find in most guestbooks. I haven’t had a problem with spammers since installing this one.

You can see what it looks like at this site (of course this is after quite a bit of tweaking the looks myself).

http://hawkdawg.com/gb/gbook.php

or this site

http://swindell-family.com/gb/gbook.php

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Have you considered http://captcha.net/ ? Depending on how confident you are at adding chunks of code to your guestbook page, this could be a robust solution to stopping spam-robots. At least this could help you in the right direction 😉

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Without details on the specific guestbook application you’re using it’s difficult to help. One way to work with the spam issue is to see if the guestbook allows moderation of comments before posting live on the web. It’s a setting that may not have been noticed or understood during setup. By setting comments to moderated before posting, you would have to go in occasionally to weed out spam still, but it wouldn’t hit your webpages until after you had the chance to approve the postings.
Maybe this can help while exploring other options.

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The guestbook I linked to at phpjunkyard offers that option, and will send you an email when a new posting is made.

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