Its actually surprisingly easy to make your own guestbook if you want to get around the ads thing. I made mine, I could write up a little tutorial if you want
i didn't make that, i'm not that talented! it's a background pixel from sayclub (a site from early 2000s).
but yeah! i think a tutorial would be a wonderful resource! not just for me but vry useful for the personal web community ^^
it does require php, but for the most part it's pretty straight forward. I would probably make the php and database files available as a plug and play type thing so that the rest of it can be done just with js :)
I'll probably make one then!!