Nasty son of unmarried parents....

[justinofoz]

For several months I have had a visitor to my site who spams my guestbook with unwanted and obnoxious adverts and offensive comments.
I have banned his IP from the site (From within cPanel at OnSmart.net), but he returns the next day or so with a new IP. I ban that and he comes back with another.

This character seems to think it is his right to sell links to his customers by spamming guestbooks so that he has a list of "links" to show his clients.

I got sick of deleting his posts, which I must do as there is no way to stop him from the guestbook script. I can ban him with every IP he comes in with, but I had a ban list some twenty or thirty long.

This morning, as usual, I checked my guestbook as soon as I logged on and found his post, coppied his IP and went to cPanel to add it to the list....which was no longer there! (?)

I contacted OnSmart to see if they could do anything about restoring the list, which of course, they could not do.

I have gone to the Whois page to see if I could get some sort of way of finding this creature, but he seems to be in The Netherlands, South Africa, Israel, The USA, Canada, Australia and a number of other countries.  It's times like this that I wish I knew how to get into someone's computer to do some irrepairable damage to his system. (Yep, never had a fowl thought for anybody before this slug came along).

With no way of finding him or who he is, I have no way of reporting his obnoxious action, even if I had any idea where it could be reported where it would get him removed from the net.

The only IP deny list I have now is the one I just started again today. (This time I'm keeping the list on my HD as well). But if anybody has any problems with these IPs and knows how to be rid of him please respond to this post. Here's the list so far. I will add to it as it grows if it will help anybody.

208.187.165.*
62.56.191.*
 Any help will be much appreciated.

[12noon]

Banning IP addresses doesn't always get the bad guys. You could end up banning an IP address that lots of people use and stop them from getting to your website.

Remember that people on dialup share IP addresses and such as AOL share IP addresses.

Anyway your best bet would be to alter your guestbook and stop people posting clickable links. If the spammers can't post links, i don't think they will bother coming back to try again.

Just make it a text only guestbook and change something to stop people posting clickable links.
 
Hope that helps.

[justinofoz]

Might have to do that Graham. I've asked around a bit about this one and seem to be getting much the same answer.

One thing I may be able to do is to gather together his clients, which are the links for businesses he leaves all over my guestbook, and email them and tell them that he is selling them links that are bogus.

[susieq]

Justin, will keep my eyes an ears open to try to help be rid of this scourge.

[justinofoz]

On advice from some friends who have had the same problems the guestbook is no longer on my site.
The bot that the person uses searches out guestbooks and the fact that the rel=nofollow is used matters little to him. The companies who have employed this person to get links for them have no other way of getting links for their sites which feature stuff like placebo, gambling, warez etc.

They never stop no matter what one does and it seems some hosting companies will close down sites with guestbooks because of the security holes they all seem to have.

So I bit the bullet and removed my guestbook. It is now my hope that this thread will be of benefit to somebody else.

[SensoVision]

I think you done wise move, since guestbooks is widely exploited over the web and not much people use them in the right way.