The guestbook is dead. Long live the digital wedding guestbook

What went wrong with the paper guestbook?

Nothing, for the people who signed it. The trouble is who did not. A paper book sits on one table by the door, signed during the drinks by the guests who happened to walk past with a free hand, and by the end of the night it holds thirty names and “congrats!!” in six different pens. The guests with the most to say, the old friend and the grandparent, are often the ones who never reached it.

A guestbook on everyone’s phone fixes the reach, not the sentiment. It can be signed from the table, at the end of the night, on the train home or the next morning, and the people who take their time over a message are given the time to.

How do guests sign a digital wedding guestbook?

The guestbook is part of the event, so it needs nothing more than the QR code guests already scanned for photos. From the event page they open the Guestbook, write their message, put their name on it and say whether they were able to attend. There is no app and no account. See How do I sign the guestbook?

• A public message, for the couple and, once it is published, for the other guests.
• A private note, for the thing a guest would say to you directly rather than in front of everybody. It never appears in the public guestbook, and only you and the moderators you invited read it. See What is the private note for?
• More than once. A guest can sign again later; a message cannot be edited or withdrawn by them afterwards, so anything to change comes to you.

The same book has a different name on other events: Feedback at a work event, a Quote Board at a party, and a Book of Memories at a memorial. It is the same thing underneath.

Can the guestbook hold photos as well as words?

The messages and the photos sit side by side in one event: the guestbook for what people want to say, the album for what they saw. Both open from the same event page, so a guest who has just signed the book is a moment from adding a photo, and the other way round. Old photos are welcome in the album too; a scan or a photo of a printed photo uploads like any other, which is how the picture of the two of you at sixteen ends up beside the message about it.

There is no audio guestbook in Mosaikin. If you want guests to leave spoken messages, a phone-style audio guestbook from a specialist hire company sits happily beside it; Mosaikin keeps the written messages and the photos.

What appears in the guestbook, and when?

A message goes through the same shape of check as a photo before it is published. If the check passes, it appears, unless you have switched on Require approval, in which case it waits for you. A message the check cannot settle is held for a person rather than published, so the system holds rather than guesses. See Why has my guestbook message not appeared?

Guestbook messages are approved one at a time from the Moderation tab, by you or by a moderator you invited. A note left with no public message is never shown publicly, because there is nothing public to show. See What does “Require approval” actually change?

What do you keep afterwards?

• A printed guestbook. On an upgraded event, the Keepsakes tab builds a typeset PDF of every approved message, laid out for reading and for printing. It is made fresh each time, so approve the last few messages first and download it again. See How do I get a printed copy of the guestbook?
• A word cloud. A picture made from the words your guests used most, sized by how often they used them, to download as a PNG. The same words appear on your dashboard as Guestbook vibes. See What is the word cloud?
• The photos beside it. Every photo on the event as one download, at full display size and cleaned of camera metadata. See What is in the photo archive?

Private notes are for you, not the book: they never appear in it as public messages. They reach you and the moderators you invited, and nobody else.

How do you get guests to write something worth keeping?

• Ask a question, not for a signature. Your welcome message can do it: “Tell us the first thing you remember about either of us.” A prompt gets stories; a blank page gets “congrats”.
• Say it from the microphone, once, after the speeches, when people are feeling sentimental.
• Leave it open. Some of the best messages are written the next morning. Mention the guestbook when you send the album link round.

Creating the event is free; keeping the printed book and the archive is one payment for the event, Premium £89 for most weddings, with no subscription. See pricing and weddings on Mosaikin.