I installed a guestbook on my site a while ago and whilst it's not something I do seriously or ever really open, I left it there. Today, for some reason, I was driven to take a look at it and found that it had grown to almost 1Gigabyte in size.
So I downloaded it, opened it and found a third of a million messages in there. Every 3, 4 or 5 minutes it received a message for months. So, some clever dick found the guestbook and did whatever he (baseball cap wearer, ponytail sporting and spotty young man no doubt) wanted, over 300,000 times.
Well, it's gone now and won't be back.
The same happened when I started a Discussion Board on another site. It looked good and worked really well until the porno and spamming people persistently got into it.
I knew in the case of the discussion board that security was likely to be an issue but I decided to see if I could control it all with a weekly tweak or something. I couldn't. That's a shame too as I wanted to build up that site with people who wanted to engage with my and the team I as working with.
Fortunately I have lost nothing particularly tangible from my experiences and if ever I do want a serious guestbook and so on, I'll buy a secure service.
Bleeders!
DW
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