Guestbook

Guestbooks were a standard feature of 1990s personal homepages, usually added with a ready-made script or a free hosting service, and a long list of signatures worked as visible proof that a site was visited. They appeared together with hit counters and webrings as part of the look of the early personal web. Over the 2000s, open guestbooks filled with automated spam links and were shut down or moved behind moderation, while blog comments and forums took over their role. No single inventor or first guestbook is documented. They are now often recreated on purpose by hobbyist sites that imitate the early web.