Stop Spamming My Chess site & Blog!

I can't remember when I first set up my chess site at http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com but since then I have managed to get the site, and most of its pages, listed with the various search engines. I tried a chat room and forum but found that nobody was using them and thus removed them. I had a blog on my site with articles arranged by topic and some people had posted comments to my blog. Unfortunately, some of those comments were spam and I selectively deleted them. Then, my hosting company had their server crash and my blog get messed up. I was unable to restore the blog so I move it to blogger.com hoping that I would not have the problem of my posts getting lost like that again. Still, several hours of work got lost.

Now, I have found a new problem. I had a guest book on my site but removed it because of the spam posts on it. I could not selectively delete posts from the guest book, so I just removed the entire thing! Here is what I posted on my chess site about the problem.

NOTE: I have removed my guest book because of the number of people who have made spam posts to it. When I last checked, I went from about 10 posts that were real comments or questions to 2752 entries! All but about 15 of these entries were spam posts! I had people from about 30 different countries spamming my guest book! I guess that is the price that I pay for being semi-successful online! Some of these jackasses actually went as far as to try to put an entire spam webpage into the little guest book area! Others would say things like, "Nice site. I will bookmark it" and then post about 30 links to sites that have nothing to with with chess or hobbies in general. I do not want people posting links to sites selling Viagra, pornography or gambling on my chess site!!!

If people wish to contact me and give me feedback, or request a link exchange, they will have to go to the "Contact Me" page on my site located at http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com/contact.shtml I have removed my unlisted telephone number from that page because of calls from telemarketers! However, you can still click on the email link to send me a message. I do NOT check my email every day but will get back to you when I finally do notice and read your email.

I do plan to put a forum or bulletin board back on my site, but only if certain conditions are met. They are: 1) The software must allow me to require everybody to register before they can make posts; 2) I must be allowed to delete spam posts!; 3) If someone makes a spam post he/she will be warned once, after that the person will lose his/her membership to the forum if he/she makes any more spam posts!; and 4) I must be able to edit posts to remove obscene language, racist comments and other offensive material.

What I would like is for other people, not just me, to be able to post games to the forum and then get feedback and analysis from other forum members. I would like to build a chess community if I could. Again, if spam becomes a real problem then I will shut this forum down for good. I will also need to make sure that I have all of the required legal disclaimers on the forum.