guestbook question

[jackiesimmonds]

Wondered if anyone can shed any light on this. If so, please would you pm me?

I have a website - www.jackiesimmonds.co.uk - and on the gallery page, I have two links to a Guestbook - "view" and "sign". I had LOADS of wonderful replies in there, but someone wrote to me recently to say that nothing had been entered since 2002. I couldn't believe it. All my messages have disappeared.

I went to the website of Guestbook.com, and they seem to have a new system in place, initiated just this October without informing their members, where they only allow you to sshow 10 messages before you have to pay to upgrade.

I am happy to upgrade, BUT I WANT ALL MY MESSAGES BACK. Has anyone done this? I am waiting for their cusomter services to get back to me - as you can imagine, they arent exactly fast.

It would be a weight off my mind if I knew someone else had had this problem and had solved it by upgrading.
I am really upset. The messages were SO nice.
??

[blkros]

Well I have no experience with guestbooks.com, so I can't help with that, but have you considered putting your own guestbook on you site, using a cgi script, or a php script?
There are many free ones out there.
look at :
http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/
or
http://php.resourceindex.com/Complete_Scripts/
they have all sorts of them under guestbooks.
They are a little more work to set up than what you're using now, but might be worth it.

[Skinns]

I used to thrive on my guestbook, seeing a nice comment every other day on my art. But after about a couple of years I decided that I would rather not have one to the "GUESTBOOK SPAMMING" that goes on now.

SPammers have used Guestbooks to grab personal emails, submitt URLS (that you do not want) and use it send emails out.

I believe guestbooks are something of the first chapter of the internet, but I don't see them being popular in the future.

skinns

[MarshaSavage]

Jackie,
I just read your message about the Bravenet Guestbook problem. I immediately went to mine (that is who I use, also) and all my message back to June of 2001 are still there. I don't seem to be having the same problem that you do. Are you sure about the 10 messages and then you have to upgrade? Where did you read that? I went to their web site but did not do any extensive looking but on first look did not see that notation.

I know it's been a month since you posted this thread, but have you done something else for a guestbook?

Marsha