123guestbook is shutting down! alas! + alternatives

[honowo]

Holy heck, I was just looking through their tour page and they say they have over 200,000 guestbooks  This is a very serious loss 

Would it be possible to host on Nekoweb or Github and link through an iframe? 

[wygolvillage]

Thinking about it I think this is simply one of the pitfalls of using a service that is hosted by another party, and it makes me think a lot about how when I was starting out a lot of the stuff beginners are encouraged to put on their site is external stuff like guestbooks, widgets, etc. Eventually stuff like imood  cbox music players and statuscafe will go offline since obviously nothing is forever. My memories of the first week or so of my site was stuffing it to the gills with widgets, iframes and stuff from other websites. I would comb through people's link pages looking for widgets and search for "cool widgets to put on my site" on google  It makes your site really cool and already fully-functional and interactive out of the box, so it's instantly gratifying- until one of those widgets stops working, then part of your site is broken!

Not that widgets are inherently a bad thing, I've written before about my affection for web "sharing culture" after all, and I think these services and widgets are very helpful and I'm glad they exist. I still use them! But it kind of has me on a train of thought about whether we should emphasize self-hosted static content to newcomers over flashier external stuff. Putting more stress on future-proofing and owning your own stuff, I guess.

[Melooon]

Would it be possible to host on Nekoweb or Github and link through an iframe? 

Yep you should be able to embed any site that allows XFrame embedding.

Putting more stress on future-proofing and owning your own stuff, I guess.

I think widgets are a lot like love. You know they will abandon you and leave a broken place in your website and there’s nothing you can do to stop them, but it’s still worth it anyway 

[wygolvillage]

I think widgets are a lot like love. You know they will abandon you and leave a broken place in your website and there’s nothing you can do to stop them, but it’s still worth it anyway 

Very apt! And I think everyone remembers their "first breakup" lol (for me it was SCM player suddenly barring me from playing all my favorite copyrighted music off of youtube lol)

[honowo]

Yep you should be able to embed any site that allows XFrame embedding.

Can confirm :)

[CATBYTE]

oof. i'm going to work on archiving mine as well, and make a dedicated page for all the messages i've gotten over the last year. then create a new one elsewhere. i'm sad for all the kind words and data that will likely just be gone with the service going down as a whole though.

glad to see some alternative guestbooks listed here at least ^^;

[neoratz]

aw dang, i use this too! :-( what methods are you guys using to archive your guestbook? i was just going to take pictures of all the messages in mine, but that does not seem very efficient

[cavitycollector]

aw dang, i use this too! :-( what methods are you guys using to archive your guestbook? i was just going to take pictures of all the messages in mine, but that does not seem very efficient

i archived mine on our dearly beloved internet archive

[levya]

this is so sad, I really liked how easy 123guestbook was to set up and use. :(

I used ayano's comment widget to set up my new guestbook and I really like it! it wasn't too hard to set up, the hardest part was just styling it the way I wanted haha. and I'm happy that now my guestbook is hosted on my site so I won't have to worry about any other guestbook services closing~

I set up a 123guestbook memorial garden on my site to archive my old messages. I just copied the html from my 123guestbook and formatted it for my site.

[wygolvillage]

For my archive, I just copied down all the text.

[PurpleHello98]

Thankfully, mine is on SmartGB---another user in this thread recommended it, and I do too. I really like its customizable HTML---I'm not sure whether or not 123GB has that. Mine should be pretty well archived through archive.org, but I'll have to see if I can download another archive to be safe.

[BUTCHBONEZ]

smartgb
cbox
guestbook central
multiguestbook
website goodies
if you have others share them here!

[alexela64]

I used ayano's comment widget to set up my new guestbook and I really like it!

Thanks for the suggestion! I really like the way that you styled your new guestbook, I'm hoping I can figure out something like that in the future.

And your memorial garden looks amazing too! i fear i will be swiping that idea (not w/o credit of course:ok:)

[shevek]

Atabook is now live replacement for 123guestbook by dimden.
You can report bugs presumably in his Discord server but definitely also the Nekoweb Discord server.

[rina]

However I suspect the kicker here is older PHP versions; 123 was made in the 00s, so it's prob running on PHP 5-7. As of the last two years, most web hosts (including the one that 123 is registered with) are banning anything below PHP 8.

this is exactly why im anti-shared host.
VPS all the way.