- Guestbook
A guestbook is a logging system that allows visitors of a
website to leave a public comment. Traditionally, the term applied to the actual ledgers held, for that same purpose, atwedding s, B&Bs andmuseum s.It is possible in some guestbooks for visitors to express their thoughts about the site or its subject. Generally, they do not require the poster to create a user account, as it is an informal method of dropping off a quick message. The purpose of a website guestbook is to display the kind of visitors the site gets, including the part of the world they reside in, and gain
feedback from them. This allows thewebmaster to assess and improve their site.A guestbook is generally a script, which is usually remotely-hosted and written in a language such as
Perl ,PHP , Python or ASP. Many free guestbook hosts and scripts exist.Often,
e-mail address es, the visitor's site's URLs andIP address es are collected, and sometimes published. A guestbook is not intended to be a place for discussion. Due to this, a guestbook is different from achat room (which is more or less realtime communication), or anInternet forum (which is intended to be a location for discussions), or ablog (which is intended for regular updates and more involved exchanges).See also
* Guestbook spam
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.