I had to pick between fixing the guestbook script or just freezing the page, and I went with freezing

Paul Carter · 2026-10-28T11:20:05.440547+00:00

So I run a little fan page for a band from Ohio that I built back in 2003, and the guestbook script finally stopped working around March. It was some old Perl thing and the hosting company moved servers and broke the mail function. My two choices were to spend a weekend digging through 20-year-old code or lock the guestbook and just leave everything else as-is. I picked locking it down, and honestly it felt weird at first like I was giving up on the site. But the rest of the page is all still there, the tour dates from 2004, the photos, the little hit counter stuck at 88,000. I put a note at the top of the guestbook saying it stopped working and people had to email me instead if they wanted to say hi. Two people actually did email me in April, including a guy from Akron who said he found the page through a search engine and remembered signing it in high school. That felt better than any working script would have. Has anyone else just frozen a dead part of an old site instead of patching it?

🐿️Pinecone Attack

Loading…

I had to pick between fixing the guestbook script or just freezing the page, and I went with freezing | Abandoned Web Finds - Pinecone Attack