Note: You can visit our Guestbook page to sign.
I have made a couple of attempts to implement a Guestbook here at The New Leaf Journal. Our original Guestbook used a free and open source plugin called Gwolle Guestbook, and that received several interesting entries (including one which inspired Victor V. Gurbo’s Animal Crossing gold rose harvesting strategy guide). However, I shuttered that Guestbook when I ran into some compatibility issues with my site set-up (I think they had to do with my disabling JQuery). I revived the Guestbook using WordPress’s native comments and implemented a sort of anti-spam system. However, in the time Guestbook 2.0 was live, it did not receive any entries before I suspended it due to a few spam comments ending up published despite my WordPress settings requiring moderation.
I was interested in implementing a Guestbook on The Emu Café Social and possibly using that as The New Leaf Journal’s guestbook as well. My original plan was to use Gwolle since I do not bar JQuery as a rule on The Emu Café Social. However, I concluded that Gwolle was a little bit too heavy for my use-case there, especially since I am also running the rather substantial BuddyPress for its activity stream and profile functionality. So instead I opted to take a second stab at using WordPress’ native comments as a Guestbook. As I explained in an ECS post, I decided to do things slightly differently – first opting to use a small plugin to have the comment blacklist updated automatically and secondly to use Antispam Bee, an entirely local anti-spam plugin, to reduce the amount of time I need to spend dealing with what will be, in the main, junk posts. Moreover, because I already use a great (highly recommended) plugin called Plugin Load Filter, I can restrict Antispam Bee to only run on pages that actually have comment forms (e.g., the Guestbook).
Because I am trying this on The Emu Café Social, I decided to also set up the same system on The New Leaf Journal. Consider this Guestbook 3.0. One good thing about the third version is that I recently became better at modifying CSS to change our theme’s appearance – having overhauled the look of both of my WordPress projects over the last few days. I took advantage of what I have learned to make our Guestbook submission form on The New Leaf Journal very snazzy. Maybe a pretty form will attract more legitimate comments than the drab standard WordPress default.
I still consider these Guestbooks experimental – as in we will see if my current server set-up combined with Antispam Bee solve the problem I had been having where a small number of spam comments somehow ended up being published. For obvious reasons – the idea of a spam comment with a malicious link being up on my site, even for a short while, is not an acceptable state of affairs (I will note I never had that problem with Gwolle back in the day, but Gwolle does not rely on WordPress’ native comments). But I am optimistic about the new set-up and, if it works, I will look into some tweaks to make sure that everything looks somewhat like a real online guestbook.
