April 10th, 2005
I earlier made the assertion for guestbook advertisers it was "a sad and sorry existence for these losers chasing a few bucks" (see my rant from March 7th, Dear Guestbook Advertisers: You Suck!).
Since that time, the advertising got worse and worse for both my guestbook and my sister's guestbook. In fact, my own life had become a "sad and sorry existence" because every day I had to log in and manually delete about three entries from both, then log in again in the evenings and delete one or two more. It was awful, and very labour intensive. It was too dreary to keep deleting these entries about 15 times a week for two different guestbooks.
At first I contacted my web hosting company to see if they could keep a log of who these morally autistic fuckwits are, and they turned the logging on for me, and gave me access to the .htaccess file. But simply preventing IP addresses is not a real solution; the list just grows weekly. You see, spammers have to change their IP addresses regularly, as they often get cut off from service providers once they are discovered to be spamming folks.
Then I just considered removing the guestbooks entirely. However painfully, I could live without one for my website, but I really didn't want to try and convince Jennifer that she should do the same. She likes her guestbook, after all, and she gets a lot of friends and strangers signing it. Besides, removing our guestbooks would be declaring defeat.
So I started to look at the problem: How are these assholes even getting their spam into the guestbooks in the first place? They must have the same sort of PERL scripts that my site uses, mustn't they? I took a look at the script and discovered that it's someone's open source script written way back in 1995 and it's used by a hell of a lot of websites out there.
I realised that it would be an easy enough job to get a hold of the script, modify it for your own nefarious purposes, create a list of websites that use this particular setup, and then set it running and just leave it alone—maybe checking a few websites now and then to ensure that it is still working.
(Now, I could never do that myself. I would imagine what it was like for the owners of those websites to have all that crap being dumped into my website, and my internal decency filter would kick in ... and so that is why I call these guestbook spammers "morally autistic." It just doesn't occur to them that they are doing anything wrong ... really truly deep down, anyway; they might make some noises or try to justify it, but they lack the wiring to understand how wrong it really is.)
Anyhow, I knew that the only way to combat those automated scripts was to take away the one thing inside the guestbook that they were looking for. You see, my script and the spammers' scripts are all looking for the same point inside the guestbook to add entries into. I needed to change that identifier (an HTML comment). Certainly that would foil the spammers, but it would foil my own guestbook scripts as well!
So it was a simple matter of changing the guestbook script, right? Well, no. As it turns out, all guestbooks on this web-hosting company's servers use the same single instance of the script; changing the script for my own guestbook would disable it for everyone else's guestbook. (Besides, they wouldn't let me.)
"OK ... fine," I said to myself last week, "I'll just make up new guestbook scripts, too." And since I've been teaching myself PHP thanks to some fairly adequate 1 documentation on the Internet, I did just that.
I created new PHP (instead of PERL) scripts which make new guestbook entries in a completely different way. And there's been no spam since then, either. (So take that, you spam fuckers!) And as I completely control the scripts, I can change things frequently ... as frequently as needed to continually thwart the spammers. It worked so well that I adapted it and replaced Jennifer's old guestbook with it!
And I even slightly changed a few things in her setup so that even if a spammer somehow figures out how to foil one of those two guestbooks in script, he can't spam the other one. You see, there's one thing I am counting on here: Spammers are inherently lazy (they're motivated by that imaginary chance that they might get something for nothing, stupid gullible fools that they are). So if my and Jennifer's guestbooks pose too much trouble for them, they'll just eventually give up and move on to softer targets.
So, do you want to sign my guestbook?
Perhaps you'd just like to view it ... ?
1 This editorial adjectival phrase brought to you courtesy of the fact that I am still, at least occasionally, a technical writer.