Spammers using my guestbook

[kaulbr]

Hello all. I am writing because I have a personal web site that I built for my upcoming wedding. The site has a guestbook on it where users can read and leave messages for my fiance and I. The hosting company that I use offers some basic free add-ons, one was a guestbook which I tweaked so it matched my web site. Anyways, as far as the coding etc. goes, I am clueless and like I said, it was pretty much just a pre-made guestbook that I am using.

Today I noticed that there were a bunch of junk posts for all sorts of things - mostly male ED drugs and other stuff like that. The font was huge and they all had links. As soon as I would delete them, more would show up. I'm assuming a spammer got a hold of the url and has some script running that is going to keep posting messages. For now I just commented out the page where users can enter a message but if you view the source you would be able to see the code being used.

Does anyone know why/how this is happening and what I can do to stop it. Like I said, I am pretty clueless when it comes to programming - I'm mostly just a designer using Dreamweaver to build the site. Any help would be appreciated.

[edited by: txbakers at 1:42 am (utc) on April 4, 2006]
[edit reason] no personal URLs [/edit]

[txbakers]

Many of those off the shelf guestbooks are just too easy to spam continually. There is no validation for posts, or users, or repeats.

The only way around something like this is to use a guestbook that requires a registration or a system where the poster has to enter text generated from images.

[kaulbr]

If I would leave the page that has the form on it down for a couple days, would the spammers move on or am I marked forever now?

PS - Thanks for your response by the way.

[txbakers]

well that's a tough one. if it's automated, shutting it down for a few days won't even be noticed.

[kaulbr]

No simple fix then huh? At least for someone who knows little to no programming.