A free guestbook is a page on somebody else's computer with a form on it. You put a "Sign my guestbook" link on your page, your visitor fills in the form over there, and the entry is stored over there too. Most of them e-mail you when somebody signs. That's the whole deal, and the important words are "somebody else's computer." I signed each of these once a week for seven months under the name "Test Bench" and checked that every entry stayed put.

SignMyPage   A-
Lost entries: none · one small ad at the top of the guestbook

You can set the guestbook's colors and background to match your own page, so the visitor hardly notices they've left. You get an e-mail for every entry, you can delete any entry from a password page, and there's a bad-word filter you can turn on. The form asks the visitor for an e-mail address but you can make it optional, which you should. The ad at the top of the guestbook page is small and stays put. Knocked down a little because signing sometimes took twenty seconds on weeknights.

GeoCities.us Page Builder guestbook   B
Lost entries: none · no ads

One click in Page Builder, and the guestbook lives right here with the rest of your site, which is the best reason to use it. It never lost a thing. It doesn't give you many choices about how it looks, and if you build your pages by hand in Notepad instead of Page Builder, the way I do, it's not really for you.

Visitors' Log   B
Lost entries: none · a text ad under each tenth entry

Dependable and plain, with a "Where are you from?" box that people love to fill in. The strange part is that it lists the oldest entries first, so after a year your newest visitor is forty screens down and nobody ever sees them. There's a setting to flip it. It's hidden on the third options page. Now you know.

GuestNest   B-
Lost entries: 1 · a banner at the top of the guestbook

Out of the box, GuestNest lets visitors type HTML into their entries. In April somebody signed my test book with a picture 400K big and three lines of blinking yellow text, and the guestbook took two minutes to load until I deleted it. Go to the settings the day you sign up and turn off HTML in entries. Other than that, it's a good guestbook. One of my weekly entries never showed up, and I never found out why.

Quill Guestbooks   C-
Lost entries: every one, for a week in June · small ad at the bottom

The prettiest guestbook I tested, with parchment backgrounds, scrolls and a quill pen that writes across the top. It's also the slowest, because all that parchment is about 60K of pictures. In the middle of June every Quill guestbook on the Web came up empty for a week. When they came back, everything from before March was gone. Pretty isn't worth that.

The Doorbell   F
Lost entries: none, and that's the problem

The Doorbell is fast and simple. It also has no way to delete an entry. None. In July somebody posted an ad for a work-at-home scheme in my test book forty-one times in one night, and it's still there, because I can't take it out, and they never answered my mail. A guestbook you can't clean is a bulletin board on a telephone pole.

The old-fashioned way   A for safety, C for effort

You can skip all of this and use an e-mail link. People write to you, and you paste the nice ones onto a guestbook page yourself. Nothing to go down, nothing to lose, and no strangers posting anything you haven't read. Adding a subject means the letters are easy to spot in your mailbox:

That works in Netscape and Internet Explorer both. The catch is that your visitor needs an e-mail program set up on the computer they're using, which isn't always true at a library or at work.

A word about manners, for guestbook owners. Don't make people give you an e-mail address to sign. Answer the ones who ask you something. Delete anything rude right away, because a guestbook full of junk tells visitors nobody's minding the store. And if you want to know how to sign other people's guestbooks politely, there's a good etiquette page over in CollegePark: Netiquette for Newbies.

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Jerry Dietz · [email protected]
Last updated Sunday, September 19, 1999