As the leading non-authority on all indie web matters, I've chosen to tackle guestbooks. There's a weird number of ways to make guestbooks, even though they all seem to look the same, and quite frankly, there's not much of a difference between them anyways.

Smart Guestbook #

Smart Guestbook (https://www.smartgb.com/) is in a weird position, in that, it's old, and a lot of sites still use it, but I can't really recommend it to anyone. It allows for basic customoization, the moderation of posted messages, and has a rudimentary spam filter, but Atabook (later mentioned) does it all better. If you're already using this, there's no real reason to switch, but otherwise, I wouldn't seek it out.

Utterances #

Utterances (https://utteranc.es/) isn't technically a guestbook, but I've seen it used for the purpose enough to put it here. This is a system that relies on GitHub issues, and as such, allows for moderation through the deletion of the issues. I wouldn't advise using this, though, as it has very limited customization outside of colors, and requires a GitHub sign in for commentors to post.

Ayano's Neocities Comment Widget #

Ayano's Neocities Comment Widget (https://virtualobserver.moe/ayano/comment-widget), despite it's name, doesn't actually work on Neocities unless you pay for the $5 membership, and as such, is no longer actively maintained. Despite this, though, the system still works fine, and doesn't need any membership on Nekoweb. It's lacking in moderation abilities outside of just deleting messages, but, does provide some "data security" due to it being based on the Google Form API as opposed to a third party service that needs a log in. This service offers the most customization by far, and you can edit it to look pretty much however you want.

Atabook #

Atabook (https://atabook.org/) is by far the most common Guestbook nowadays, and for good reason. Atabook provides a great deal of moderation tools, has capatchas, logs IPs, and offers rudimentary customization through color theming and the changing of the logo. Atabook is honestly the greatest choice for traditional out of site guestbooks, it just works, and it's still actively maintained (Smart Guestbook is 19 years old now, and not much different than when it came out).

So what? #

Honestly, nowadays, there's no reason to use a guestbook other than Atabook, something you made yourself, or Ayano's Widget. There's other options, even outside of what I listed, but they just don't offer much more, and often lack proper security measures. With Ayano's widget the information is all handled by Google, and with Atabook, it has some insurance in the form of being created by Dimden, who's worked on more things than I can list off.