How to add a guestbook to your website
An UltraGuest guestbook is a page hosted on our servers that your visitors reach through a link on your site. Nothing to install, nothing to pay: you need an e-mail address and about five minutes. 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 page offers two ready-made HTML snippets, a "View Guestbook" link and a "Sign Guestbook" link, each with a small "Free Guestbook by UltraGuest.com" credit line. Copy the one you want into your page's HTML wherever the link 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-ID and https://www.ultraguest.com/sign/YOUR-ID, so you can also write your own link or button. The page also has instructions for Blogger.
The guestbook opens as its own page; it is not an iframe or a script that renders inside yours.
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) and an optional background image, with a live preview. Design › Guestbook Header takes text or HTML for the top of the guestbook: a welcome line, a link back, a small logo. 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, 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
Messages are managed under Messages, sorted into Public, Private, Pending, Hidden and Trash. Each message can be edited, deleted or given another status, and next to every message's IP address there is a "Block IP" link. Settings › Security lists the blocked addresses and lets you add or release one. Under Settings › Email Notification you can be told at once about new public messages and, separately, about 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 link code, or your own link to https://www.ultraguest.com/view/YOUR-ID, into your index.html or a guestbook.html page, upload it, and you are done. The same goes for any other static host or hand-written site. 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.