Peter's guest book

First opened on 30th October, 1995.
Closed on 22nd March, 2004.
Over one thousand customers served.

In the beginning of the web, it was quite cool to have a web site. It was even cooler to have a guest book, where anyone visiting the site could leave their name, a comment, and a link back to their own page. That arrangement worked well for several years, until the early 21st century, when regular people no longer found personal sites as cool as they once did, and it was no longer as common that you would sign the guest book of a total stranger.

At this time, the spammers had really started making everyone’s life miserable by flooding innocent people’s e-mail with their crap. Spamming is an arms race, so while the people who are fed up with spam try harder to block it, the crooks try to find new ways of getting their crap out the door. Enter the guest book spam. Guest book spam was not used in the same way as e-mail spam, since it did not reach as many people. Instead, the crooks tried to find guest books that were ranked high in search engines, posting a link back to their spam web site on it, hoping for the search engine to see the link as an “important” link due to its origin.

I saw the spammers come, and had to start deleting posts. I usually kept the post (for public shaming), but deleted the links and anything else that would link back to the crook that posted it. I added a notice on the entry form that advertising was prohibited. I added a spam filter in my guest book. It did not work. The crooks continued to post their crap in my guest book, whereas the number of legitimate posts had dwindled down to almost zero. Having no desire to try to keep up with the crooks, I decided to close my guest book in March of 2004, after over eight years of service.

I still love to hear your comments; please write to peter@softwolves.pp.se and tell me what you think about my site. All criticism is welcomed!