A Guestbook component gives your website visitors the ability to view what other visitors have written, as well as write and leave their own public message. Many visitors will read these entries and take that info into account in making their own purchasing decisions.

The Guestbook component should have spam protection to minimize any detrimental impact of visitors leaving their email addresses.It should also have a way to ensure that a lot of invalid guestbook entries are not created by spam-bots. This is usually controlled with a spam protection image which requires the visitor to input a secret string to ensure a person is actually placing the entry into the guestbook. An administrator should be notified whenever a guestbook entry is created in case there is a need for human eyes to validate the content of the entry.