Guestbook is closed - permanently
Thank you for your interest in the Schlatter Family Site Guestbook. I am sorry to announce that as of 22 January 2005, this guestbook is no longer active. For those of you who wanted to leave comments, a word of explanation is in order.
I am closing down this guestbook because of the following abuse:
Nigerian scammers
On my guestbook you will find comments entered by someone signing the name "Mugu" or "Guyman" who left messages such as "I dey here ooooooo," and "Guyman stay off."
These messages are entries left by Nigerians who are involved in running the Nigerian 419 scam. They harvest e-mail addresses from guestbooks and leave comments from "Mugu" and "Guyman" to alert other scammers that the e-mail addresses on the guestbook have been harvested.
Here are links explaining and exposing the Nigerian 419 scam:
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U.S. Secret Service |
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Snopes |
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Scambusters.org |
Chinese language advertising
Approximately one year ago, someone posting from China began to leave comments on the guestbook two to three times a week. These were in Chinese, thus, the comments appeared in ASCII garbage on the guestbook. The comment was advertising of some sort. I would delete the advertising only to have it re-appear within a few days.
On-line gambling and pharmaceutical advertising
Now -- in late December 2004-early January 2005 -- the guestbook has been attacked by individual(s) posting long lists of URLs advertising on-line gaming and on-line pharmaceutical purchases. I delete these lists only to have them re-appear within a few hours. Over the course of a few days in December 2004-January 2005, these two comments with long lists of URLs were inserted over and over again, using several hundred megabytes of server space.
Shut down the guestbook
I pay for this website and I am no longer going to provide a forum for free advertising or for Internet scams. If "Mr. Mugu," or the people posting the Chinese language advertising, or the clown posting the gaming and pharmacy advertisements intended to shut down my guestbook, well, congratulations, you assholes win, I quit. What a shame that a resource such as the Internet is plagued by ignorant people with no respect for others.
I will leave the guestbook comments on the site -- click on this link to see the guestbook comments prior to my shutting down the guestbook on 22 January 2005.