Hot take: dropping $80 on a 90s style guestbook script was either genius or stupid for my retro site

I paid like $80 to some guy on a Geocities forum back in 2005 for a custom Perl guestbook script that looked like it was from 1997 with blinking text and a hit counter. It saved my site because everyone loved signing it and I got like 500 messages in a month before spambots ruined it. But now I think it was a total waste because free alternatives like cgi-bin hacks existed and the script had a bug that deleted every 50th entry. Has anyone else spent cash on old school web features that either paid off or bombed out on them?

2 comments

2 Comments

wyatt_chen861mo ago

Yeah those custom Perl scripts were a mixed bag. I dropped $50 on a cgi chatroom script around the same time and it worked great for a year until someone found a hole in it and used it to redirect my whole site to some weird coupon page. If you still have the old guestbook running, try blocking the spambots by adding a simple math question to the submission form, it killed like 90% of mine back then.

richard_mason1mo ago

You know, I used to be one of those people who said spending money on guestbook scripts was just throwing cash away when free stuff existed everywhere. But honestly, this post changed my mind a little. I dropped $60 on a hit counter and forum combo way back and it felt like the dumbest purchase at first, especially when the counter reset itself every time I updated the HTML. But over the years that script taught me more about Perl and basic web security than any tutorial ever did because I had to fix its bugs myself. So maybe it wasn't totally stupid if it got you real engagement and a learning experience out of it, even with the spambot problems. Sometimes paying for something forces you to actually dig in and understand how the whole thing works.