Taustin Powers

Over night, it logged over one page worth of failed attempts. Holy nuts, I had no idea my guest book was under constant attack like that!! A lot of the entries were blocked for other reasons, such as invalid email address, or URLs in the message, but quite a few were because that hidden field was filled in.

Alright, I'm having the file report every time an error message is triggered by the guest book form - and there were 3 incidents already just in the last two hours! So this method is definitely somewhat effective. We'll see how well it works in the long run....

Thanks for elaborating. I know that most of this stuff is self-explanatory for most people, I'm just really a PHP-newbie. But I already have a little script that adds email addresses to a text file (for a mailing list), so I'm sure I can find a way to have the guest book write to a text file as well, when the error is triggered. I'll just have to take some time and play around with it!

In that case, I am very limited! :)But I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Alrighty, I implemented it. A field called "message", in the posting form and everything, it would even add its content to the guestbook entry if the entire post wasn't blocked.And it's located below the submit button, covered by an image that blends in with the background. Now the wait begins to see what happens! :)EDIT: Is there a way to somehow log the failed attempts?

Ooh, I like the idea of putting an image over it! Maybe even one that blends into the background, camouflaging it. Right now, I just placed the field way below everything else, so one would have to scroll to even get to it. And since there is only a few fields and the Submit button at the top, there would really be no need to scroll and look for anything else...but I like your idea a lot better.

Thanks guys! I actually managed to recover 95% of the entries through Google.That archive page is cool though!

I just accidently deleted all the guest book entries on my band's website. They were all saved in a filed called log.dat online, which has now been overwritten. Just a minute ago, when I accessed the file directly in my browser, I still saw all the entries. Like an idiot ("are they really gone then?"), I hit refresh, and now it's gone....(no backups. i know, i know...)Could there be a way to recover the previously cached version of the page?Broswer is Safari, most recent version of OSX.

Just found this thread by the original poster:http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=12247Seems like the spambots caught up with him eventually. I'm thinking about trying this method, but NOT HIDING the field, leaving it visible on the page. The field could be named "Name" or "Message" in the code, but you can label it "Please leave blank" on the actual page. Yes, users would see an extra pointless field when making their entry, but that still seems more user-friendly to me than the captcha-method... And only someone who is ACTUALLY LOOKING AT AND READING the page would know not to enter that field....does that make sense at all?

How about NOT hiding the "trap" field, but leaving it visible on the page? You could just label it "Please leave blank" or something like that? And hide it at the bottom of the page? Yes, every user could see it, but I think I would still prefer that to the captcha method. Does that sound like it would work?

Anyone else tried this with good results?It seems strange to me.....how exactly does a spambot actually work? Can it even fill in a field that it finds in the code, if it's not actually displayed? I think I will try this, but I'd love to hear from more people who already have!

I'm working on a new website project that may get considerable amounts of hits, so I am thinking about placing a few ads to make some money. How do I go about this? I have never dealt with ads before. Can you get paid based on the number of hits your page gets? Or do people actually have to click on the ads? How do I find people/companies to place their ads on my page? Is there a service (google?) that just loads random ads in your page and you get a flat rate fee or something?Any input would be appreciated.

Yes, it opens in a new browser window, the height and width of which I would like to define. Did you even read my first post?

Not much to it so far - just simple links to the jpegs with target="_blank".

I just added the first photo page on my band's website, www.theletter3.comSo far, I made a page with the thumbnails, and when you click on a thumbnail, the browser opens a new window with the picture. Is there a way I can control the size of that new window, to make it the exact dimension of the photo? That way I could avoid scroll bars and excessive white space around the pictures. Thanks.

I have it validated for xhtml 1.0 transitional. I used an iframe in the layout. Can a site be xhtml strict compliant if it contains an iframe? The reason I am using it so far (I'm still new to html, mind you) is that I want the top and menu section of the page to always be there and NOT reload every time a different content is selected from the menu. Are there other ways to achieve this, without an iframe? (I know about regular frames, but find that option even less appealing...)This is what it looks like:http://www.theletter3.com