Phoca Guestbook 
Requirements:
- Joomla! 1.5, Joomla! 1.6, Joomla! 1.7
Documentation
http://www.phoca.cz/documentation/category/3-phoca-guestbook-component
Demo (Joomla! 1.5):
http://www.phoca.cz/demo/
Demo Phoca Guestbook and Joomla! 1.6:
http://www.phoca.cz/joomlademo/phoca-guestbook
Trying to prevent from spam
http://www.phoca.cz/documents/3-phoca-guestbook-component/436-trying-to-prevent-from-spam
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Please, read before making review based on spam issues
If you hate spammers, please don't blame Phoca Guestbook or other extensions which produce input form field on your site.
To not be spammed, you should make all the recommendations in this article:
http://www.phoca.cz/documents/3-phoca-guestbook-component/436-trying-to-prevent-from-spam
and of course your server needs to have a lot of different tools to prevent from spam.
And you need to care about your inputs, because for example, you cannot prevent from human spammers automatically :-(
The situation with spam is really horrible (I know it from my experiencs where spam and ddos attacks makes my server down most of time)
If you have some input form, you need to care about it everyday.
Regarding Phoca Guestbook: I am regularly working on different protections for the Phoca Guestbook but reviews here based on spam issues (without reading the articles and making no other spam protections on the server) demotivate me like other "input form" developers. Maybe there will be nobody in the future who will do such extension because he/she will be blamed instead of the spammers :-( :-(
Phoca Guestbook is not the one who spams your sites, please think of it while making a review. And Phoca Guestbook is not the one who ignores the spam problems (just see the article and the features) but you should know that it is really difficult to fight the spam :-( :-(
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Hi, this was explained in the forum, this doesn't depend on PHP version.
In Joomla! you can set parameters in:
- Parameters (Component Parameters)
- Parameters Component in menu link to guestbook, see:
http://www.phoca.cz/documents/16-joomla/65-component-s-parameters-settings-itemid-in-joomla
There are two kinds of checking the URL field:
1) You can set if this field will be required or not. If yes, then the URL must be added, if no, then the URL needs not to be added
2) The format of URL will be controlled independently of the choice of 1). It means:
- If you set that the URL will be required and
-- user will add URL with the wrong format - user will get error message because of wrong format
-- user will add URL with the right format - OK
-- user will leave the URL field empty - user will get error message because of empty URL field
- If you set that the URL will be not required and
-- user will add URL with the wrong format - you get error message because of wrong format
-- user will add URL with the right format - OK
-- user will leave the URL field empty - OK, because the field is not required.
Jan
Hi, thank you for your review. I don't speak Romanian language :-(. This is why there is no such translation. If you speak Romanian language, will be great if you can create one. This will be appreciated.
Thank you, Jan
All users should notice is that the real guest book adjustments of fields, captcha and requirements are made on the Menu Link, not while creating a GuestBook!
So don't panic when you dont see any options while creating :P
The only issues I had were figuring out how to install the additional language packs, since it was not just a matter of "installing" via the Joomla installer.... I had to unzip them and copy them over the the specific language folders using FTP.
Poking around it is easy enough to figure out.
Thanks for this!
Hi, thank you for your review, please take a look to the documentation:
http://www.phoca.cz/documents/46-translation/274-how-to-install-language-pack-in-joomla
Jan
(1) If Captcha is going to be case-sensitive as it is now, there should be a message regarding that somewhere as it is not the expected Captcha behavior.
(2) The grammar needs some serious work. There are commas all over where there shouldn't be and the English is mediocre at best. Perhaps someone could help translate it a bit better.
(3) The math Captcha is a bit odd and could use some instructions for users. In my test pool, some people were trying to enter the equation itself. lol I know, I know. Typically math is displayed in plain text though so the novice internet users might need a little assistance.
I have already rectified these issues on my site as they are easily sorted but I just thought I would mention them. Again, they are minor issues and this extension is very good.
Thank you for another nice component.
Hi, thank you for your review:
1) 3) You can write it into description field, so this depends on administrator which instructions will be displayed
2) "Perhaps someone could help translate it a bit better" this is the problem because there is nobody to do, so if you want to help, just fix all the English issues and let me know. Will be great and I will appreciate such help a lot.
Thank you, Jan
