12/18/2007
Well, it's been much to long since I last updated this page. We have been
busy with the day-to-day operation of this site. Trying to stay on top of
the spam, trying out new ways to make this site profitable so I can put the
time and money into adding new features. Today I released a long overdue new
feature. You now have the ability to add up to four extra questions to your
book. You can make these questions anything you want up to 45 characters in
length. Your member will provide the answers up to 150 characters in length.
We put these limits on the questions and answers to try to maintain the look
and layout of the books. In researching this feature we found that other
sites only store the answers, so if you change the questions, the answers no
longer make any sense. We store both the answer and the original questions
for each entry so your entries are always correct. We took the time to get
this right!!
02/18/2007
Well, they let me back into the country.....
02/07/2007
From early Saturday February 10th until late on February 17th I will be away from my computer. I will be traveling with my trusty laptop; however the place I'm heading to may not have reliable Internet access. Please be patient during this week if responses to email, or support posts is not what you are used to.
07/21/2006
I thought I should take a few minutes to let you know what is going on with our site. Over the last week we have been fighting with a problem that has caused the site to, at times, be anywhere from slow, to completely unavailable. I have been tweaking the server to try to keep it running, but at times it has spiraled out of control, causing me to completely block access to the server while it recovers. We, GDS Net Services INC., host a number of sites on the same server. Finally tonight I found what I think is the cause of the problem. All indicators pointed to one of our sites being attacked, and I worked to block this attack. After further investigation I found one of our other sites under heavy attack. This attack is aimed at placing spam entries on one of our sites. The attack is at a rate of well over 3000 connections to our server per hour. We feel that this attack along with our normal load, is causing the server to be overloaded and at times on the brink of spiraling out of control. At this point we have a way to semi-block this attack, cutting the extra load on the server by about 50%. However, there is always a "however", in blocking this attack we may have blocked some legitimate traffic. If you have any members that can no longer access your board, or book, please send us the IP of the visitor and we will do what we can to allow them access.
I'll try to keep you updated as I know more about this situation.
05/23/2006
I made a few changes to the HTML Code page in the admin area. The page now
has examples for the most used HTML code for your books.
02/18/2006
The security codes are doing a great job of keeping our books free of spam.
The codes can now be enabled or disabled in the Features Menu. We
strongly suggest that you keep them enabled
11/07/2005
The security codes are back, hope they work out a bit better this time
10/22/2005
For now we had to remove the security code, to many issues with folks not
entering the code.. not sure how they could miss the image and entry box.
10/7/2005
Over the last week we have been under a continuous spam
attack. Due to our current anti-spam features only a few of our books ever had entries
posted to their books and in most cases we removed the entries in just a few hours at
most. But these attacks slowd the server at times making the books slow loading to your
visitors. I will also be looking back through old entries to remove any spam I can find
After a lot of thought we decided it was time to take the next step in protecting your
books. As you may have noticed the page where you make entries in your book now has a
CAPTCHA. What is a CAPTCHA you ask? This is the image with the letters and numbers that
must be read by human eyes and added to the form before it is submitted. This should help
to stop the automated flooding of our books.
I realize this may cause your visitors some inconvenience, and you may lose a few entries
from your book, but in the long run a less spam is worth the small inconvenience.
Is this a permanent fix, I doubt it for 2 reasons. First, we will always have
“human” spam. This is where a person will spam just a few of our books. Second,
the spammers are working on projects to read the CAPTCHA’s. This is, and will
continue to be, a cat and mouse game
CAPTCHA Information….
CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and
Humans Apart".
CAPTCHAs are designed to prevent bots – programs that pose as humans on the Internet
– from abusing Internet services. Bots, driven not to dominate but to sell, sign up
for thousands of free email accounts every minute, sending millions of spam messages from
them. They infiltrate chat rooms, collecting personal information and posting links to
promotional sites. They generate worms, break password systems, invade privacy, and drain
resources.
Copyright 2004. Freeguestbooks.net & GDS Net Services INC.
