I am pissed and need to rant.
Take a look at our Guestbook page:
http://www.audioheritage.org/guestbook.htm
Appoximately one year ago, our Guestbook "broke" when we changed servers. A combination of not knowing exactly what was wrong and questions on the merits of this feature meant that it took me until November 14 to put it back in service. Now I'm considering shutting it down again for good.
The problem is that spammers have figured out that Guestbooks are a great place to plant links to their site in order to increase their rankings on search engines. I saw the beginnings of this phenomenon just before our book went down. Now it appears to be an epidemic. In the four weeks that the book has been back, we have recieved exactly 4 genuine entries while I have removed dozens of spams. The latest entry just takes the cake. This evening, I'll remove this spam, and depending on my mood, may just nuke the entire section.
Don
PS This is just the first of problems to come. Spammers have figured out that forums are also a great place to dump their crap. Fortunately, we have only been hit twice, and stangely enough, both cases were from Jebus freaks. Fortunately, there is more control with a forum, but I have no doubt it will become a real issue with time.