My favourite phase of the web was Web Golden (1.61803). :) It mostly had static websites but some websites had tiny guestbooks that allowed a little user-generated content.
I remember some of the website hosting providers made it really easy to add guestbooks, even for someone with no programming experience. All one needed to do was create an HTML page that contained a <form> element with the "action" attribute set to a URL of a server-side script provided by the hosting provider. The server-side script would accept every comment submitted via the guestbook and automatically insert the new comment into a static HTML page after escaping the special characters properly.
I remember some of the website hosting providers made it really easy to add guestbooks, even for someone with no programming experience. All one needed to do was create an HTML page that contained a <form> element with the "action" attribute set to a URL of a server-side script provided by the hosting provider. The server-side script would accept every comment submitted via the guestbook and automatically insert the new comment into a static HTML page after escaping the special characters properly.