How to add a guestbook to your website
To add a guestbook to your website, sign up for a free UltraGuest guestbook, confirm your e-mail address, then copy the embed code or a link from Account › Link Code into your page. It takes about five minutes, costs nothing and needs nothing installed.
An UltraGuest guestbook is a page hosted on our servers that your visitors reach through a link on your site, and that you can also show inside your own page. This guide walks through the whole setup, from signing up to moderation, and ends with notes for Neocities and other static sites.
1. Sign up
Open the signup form and enter your e-mail address and a password. That is all it asks: your first guestbook is created with you, ready to receive messages. Pass the human-verification check and click "Create guestbook".
Name it whenever you like, under Settings › Guestbook Options in the Control Panel: the name and, if you have one, your website address appear on the guestbook, and the address becomes a link back to your site. One account can hold several guestbooks - Account › My Guestbooks adds another and switches between them.
2. Verify your e-mail address
We send a verification link to the address you gave. The guestbook is not enabled until you click it, so check the spam folder if it does not arrive within a few minutes. Then log in to the Control Panel; its welcome page lists the first steps.
3. Get the link code
Go to Account › Link Code. The first tab, On your page, gives you the embed: one line of HTML, an iframe that shows your newest public messages inside your own page. The other two offer ready-made HTML for a "View Guestbook" and a "Sign Guestbook" link to the guestbook's own page, each with a small "Free Guestbook by UltraGuest.com" credit line. Copy what you want into your page's HTML wherever it should appear; you are free to change the text, the styling or the credit. The addresses behind the links are simply https://www.ultraguest.com/view/YOUR-ADDRESS and https://www.ultraguest.com/sign/YOUR-ADDRESS, so you can also write your own link or button. The page also has instructions for Blogger.
A new guestbook's address ends in a short code; Account › Guestbook Address lets you give it a name of your own instead, and the old address keeps leading to it.
4. Make it look like part of your site
Under Design › Colors and Style you set the text, link, background, message text, message background and message border colours, the font family and size (10 to 20 pixels), with a live preview. Design › Guestbook Header takes text or HTML for the top of the guestbook: a welcome line and a link back. If you know CSS, Design › Edit CSS replaces the whole stylesheet with your own, so the guestbook can match your site exactly. It replaces the defaults completely, so define every class you need; delete the CSS to return to the colour settings.
5. Choose your options
Settings › Guestbook Options holds the switches: the link to your homepage, the "sign guestbook" link, smilies, a Website field for your visitors' own sites, up to three custom fields of your own, approval of new messages, private messages and the word filter. Settings › Language shows the guestbook's labels in one of 24 languages, and Date and Time sets your time zone and date format.
6. Moderate, block and get notified
The Control Panel opens on your latest messages with buttons to approve, hide or delete each. All of them are under Messages, sorted into Public, Private, Pending, Hidden and Trash (a deleted message waits there 30 days before it is gone for good). Each message can be edited, deleted or given another status, and next to every message from the last twelve months there is a "Block IP" link that keeps its writer out (you see the country a message came from, never the address). Settings › Security lists the blocked addresses and lets you add or release one. New messages are e-mailed to you from the start, with a button to approve or hide each one from the mail; Settings › Email Notification sets it separately for public messages and for private messages and messages waiting for your approval. The mail comes from notification@ultraguest.com. The moderation guide explains what happens automatically.
7. RSS feed
Every guestbook has an RSS feed of its latest ten public messages. The address is shown on the Control Panel's RSS Feed page, and the guestbook page announces it in its HTML head for feed readers.
Neocities and other static sites
Neocities describes itself as free static web hosting: you upload HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and there is no server-side scripting to run a guestbook of your own. That is exactly the case a hosted guestbook is made for. Paste the embed or the link code, or your own link to https://www.ultraguest.com/view/YOUR-ADDRESS, into your index.html or a guestbook.html page, upload it, and you are done; the embed is an iframe, which a free Neocities site allows. The same goes for any other static host or hand-written site, and the guide for a free Neocities site goes through it step by step. To make the guestbook feel like part of your site, copy your background and text colours into Colors and Style, or paste your site's CSS into Edit CSS and adapt the class names; visitors go back through the "return to your site" link.
Questions? Read the FAQ, see the full feature list, or contact support.