Manage messages

It is your guestbook, so you decide what stays on it. Everything below lives in the Control Panel, mostly under Messages, and changes the public page immediately.

The message list

The Control Panel opens on your latest ten messages, each with what state it is in and buttons to approve, hide or delete it, next to your guestbook's address and embed code, ready to copy. The full list under Messages shows all messages or only the Public, Private, Pending or Hidden ones, ten per page. For each message you see the name, e-mail address, date, country flag, your custom fields, the text, the status and the country it was posted from, with a "Block IP" link next to it that keeps its writer out of your guestbook. The address itself stays private, and after twelve months it is deleted and only the country is kept. Two buttons do the work: Delete Message (after a confirmation) and Edit Message; tick several messages to delete them together.

The trash

A deleted message leaves your guestbook, its feed and its embed at once, but it is not gone yet: it waits under Messages › Trash for 30 days. Restore puts it back where it was, Delete now removes it for good straight away, and after 30 days it is deleted for good by itself.

Edit anything, change the status

Edit Message lets you correct a name, an e-mail address, the location, a custom field or the message text itself, and set the status: Public, Private, Pending Approval, Hidden or Trash. Hidden takes a message off the public page without deleting it, so you can put it back later; Trash is the same as deleting it.

Approve before publishing

Tick Approve new messages under Settings › Guestbook Options and new posts wait as Pending until you approve them. The Control Panel's Home page tells you how many are waiting and has an Approve button on each, and you can be e-mailed each time one arrives. This is the calmest setting for a guestbook that gets a few messages a week.

Private messages

With private messages enabled, the sign form gets a "Private" checkbox. A private message is shown only to you in the Control Panel; the public page merely notes that a private message was added, and when.

Replies

Answer any message under Messages › Edit Message, or follow "Write a reply" in its notification e-mail. Your reply is shown under the message on your guestbook, in your embed and in your RSS feed, and it goes into your downloads with it. It is plain text with smilies, checked like everything else that is published here, and you can change or remove it at any time. The visitor is not e-mailed when you reply: nobody who signed your guestbook agreed to that.

Notifications and the mail log

New messages are e-mailed to you, and a new guestbook has this switched on from the start. Under Settings › Email Notification you choose separately about new public messages and about private messages and messages waiting for approval. Each mail carries the message text and a button to approve or hide it straight from your inbox, without logging in; the button works once, for 14 days. Up to five messages a day arrive at once and anything more comes together in one daily summary, so a busy day cannot flood your inbox and nothing goes missing. The mail comes from notification@ultraguest.com and can be switched off with one click, and a log in the Control Panel lists the notifications we sent, so you can check whether one went out.

Your data stays yours

Account › Download My Data gives you everything as JSON, the messages alone as CSV for a spreadsheet, or your public messages as a web page to keep, print or put on your own site, whenever you like. Settings › Download › E-mails lists the e-mail addresses your visitors left, as a text file. Every guestbook also has an RSS feed of its latest ten public messages, and Account › Statistics shows the number of messages, unique visitors and page views.