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I finally pulled the plug on my "open" guest book on my official website. Like many authors, I had a guest book so that readers and other visitors could leave their comments. About a year ago I started to get the strangest comments and the commentors were from numerous places world wide. Almost always they included a link back to a site that was questionable at best, sometimes porno, sometimes selling pills and widgets, but never mentioning anything whatsoever about having read any of my works.
Several other authors have complained about the same thing and one by one have mentioned the removal of their guest books or finally, reluctantly, making them private only. I was a hold out? Don't know why, but until today I would just go in once or twice a week and clean out the garbage, make an administrative note of those who were repeat offenders so that they couldn't post again, and go on with life. But today, today one showed up who was armed with at least a hundred urls and he kept posting and posting and posting. I went in, cleaned up, noted his urls and ... yep, ten minutes later I get a barrage of emails about new entries and yep they were from him and he was armed with about two hundred more!
That's when I knew it was time for the sun to set on my old "open" guest book. With a swift click of the delete button I sent the entire guest book into oblivion. It is no more. So, if you were one of those kind enough over the years to post a note and want to post again there's still the private guest book. But for those who are members of "guest book desecrations international" ... adios!
Guest Book Notice
2 comments:
Wow...I have yet to have that happen to that extent...every now and then I get some crazies posting and I remove them...but I can see why you removed the guest book all together.
Hopefully, people who want to leave you a comment, will just email you directly. Personally, I don't see how these "spammers" have any time.
I know the feeling Peggy! Spammers seem to have a field day when all we're trying to do is give our readers a place to comment. Jeesh!
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