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Every retro site archive I see skips the guestbook, and that's the whole point of the place
I keep seeing people link to these old GeoCities pages on here and call them 'preserved' when they've only grabbed the index and a couple of subpages, and it drives me a little crazy because the guestbook and the 'last updated' footer are usually gone. I pulled the Wayback Machine copies of a 1997 fan page for a Toledo radio station last week and the crawl had 4 snapshots, but not one of them had the guestbook, which is where all the actual life was. A guestbook from 1998 will tell you who was fighting with who, which webring died, and when the owner stopped caring, and that is the history, not the blinking marquee at the top. I've been saving full directories to a 2TB drive since 2019, 340 sites so far, and the ones I keep going back to are the ones with 60 signed entries from strangers. There's a fan page for a defunct comic shop in Fresno where the guestbook outlived the shop by 3 years and people were still posting 'is this place open' into 2004. If you're archiving stuff, grab the guestbook HTML and any cgi-bin output before you call it done. What are the oldest guestbook entries you all have seen still sitting on a live server?
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