Fantastico Viper Guest Book

[QHF]

I was looking in the Fantastico scripts for a guest book and found the Viper Guest Book. The description states: "The ViPER Guest book is a high end guest book script that is versatile, reliable, very comfortable and easy to use...".

I followed the link to the Viper homepage to read up on this script and found the following statement on the web page: "The Viper Guest book project is dead. It's strongly recommended to uninstall the script."

Is it safe to install this Guest book, and is there an alternative.

QHF

[Matt]

LOL!

Boy I really am glad I do not have to maintain Fantastico.

Its probably a very difficult job to keep up with all of these little scripts, their constant updates, and in this case, EOL (End Of Life)

I'd say 100% NO DO NOT install the guestbook if the developer's site says that the project is dead.

It may work this week, but over time more and more exploits will be found, and if there are no available updates, the end result will probably be a hacked website.

Have you contacted Nettenburg yet and notified them of the issue? I am thinking they would remove it from the library if they heard this.

Let me know, otherwise I will ask tell them about the issue and see if they will remove it from their 3rd party software bundle.

[QHF]

LOL!

Have you contacted Nettenburg yet and notified them of the issue? I am thinking they would remove it from the library if they heard this.

Let me know, otherwise I will ask tell them about the issue and see if they will remove it from their 3rd party software bundle.

Sorry about the late response. I contacted the Nettenburg site and they directed me to their General Forum where I found the following Posts:

• Question to Nettenburg Support Forum- I have a question though regards one of the scripts in the list we currently use/have.. it's regards the Viper guestbook. It's a great guestbook, and works very well. However, it appears on their main site the project has stopped: http://www.vipergb.de.vu/ It shows the message "The ViPER Guestbook project is dead. It's strongly recommended to uninstall the script!" Especially the last comment makes me wonder if there are any problems (security issues) with it, or if we can just keep on using it? Any thoughts on this?
• Answer from Nettenburg Support Forum- There are no known security issues as of now. You can keep on using it. If any security issues are discovered, we will deprecate it within Fantastico

The above can be found at: http://www.netenberg.com/forum/viewt...per+guest+book

I'm not sure what they mean when they say they will "deprecate (?) it within Fantastico." On another Nettenburg Forum they did mention that possiblily several Guest Books will be available in Fantastico 3. When version 3 becomes available will GlowHost be upgrading?

Thanks for all you help. You guys are real pros.

[Matt]

Thanks for the kind words.

Yes, we will definitely be upgrading to Fantastico 3 as soon as it is stable, and provided their licenseing agreement doesn't change to something unfavorable, it will be on the servers as soon as it is ready to roll out.

Good to hear that their are no known holes with that script the only thing that I can caution on it is this:

When you install any script on your site it is a very good idea to subscribe to the author's mailing list in-case new holes are found in the software. The problem here is that if a hole is found, there is no mailing list since the author said he would no longer maintain the software.

Its great that Fantastico will deprecate the script, but the problem I see with their philosophy is that, (to my knowledge) there is no mailing done either by Nettenburg or the Fantastico software itself to notify the user that the software has a hole and should be removed due to lack of support.

I am hoping Fantastico 3 has some sort of mailer built-in to do this, but it still requires that the user always has a current email address configured in the Fantastico admin, so its definitely not foolproof.

Hope it helps.