Yes, I wanted to have a guestbook for a site with close to zero visitors
I didn’t jump straight into writing code, or prompt calude to spin one for me. I created a guestbook.md and started planning. What the flow would look like, what the stack would be, how someone would sign it.
And the first thing that stopped me was auth.
I don’t want people to click through a GitHub OAuth or a Google login just to leave a note on my guestbook. That’s already too much to ask, that they’d want to hand over permissions to some random portfolio site just to say hi.
So I wanted it to be open. Just a name, a message, submit.
Then I read about why guestbooks don’t usually work that way. Spam. The moment you leave the door open, bots walk in. I don’t want to open my guestbook one day and find it full of garbage.
I thought about building a filter. Catch certain words, block them. But that felt like a rabbit hole with no clean exit.
Then I thought, okay, what if I approve entries manually before they show up. Someone signs, it sits in a queue, I review it, it goes live. Simple enough.
Except I looked at the math. At the rate this site gets visitors, there would probably be one entry every few months. And I know myself. I would forget to check. I’d remember six months later, someone left a kind note in October, and it’s now March sitting unread in a database table I haven’t opened since I set it up.
That felt worse than not having a guestbook at all.
I kept going in circles. Every version of it either asked too much from the visitor or created a chore I wouldn’t keep up with. The free and open version invites spam. The moderated version invites neglect.
So I closed the note and didn’t build it.
Maybe someday I’ll figure out the right shape for it. But for now the guestbook lives here, in this note, as the thing I thought about but couldn’t finish thinking through.