What best practices should be followed when implementing anti-flood measures in a PHP guestbook application to prevent issues like skipping while loops?

When implementing anti-flood measures in a PHP guestbook application to prevent issues like skipping while loops, it is important to set a time limit between consecutive submissions to prevent users from flooding the guestbook with multiple entries in a short period of time. This can be achieved by storing the timestamp of the last submission in a session variable and comparing it with the current timestamp before allowing a new entry to be added.

session_start();

// Set the time limit between consecutive submissions (in seconds)
$timeLimit = 60;

// Check if the last submission timestamp is set in the session
if(isset($_SESSION['last_submission']) && time() - $_SESSION['last_submission'] < $timeLimit){
    echo "You are submitting entries too quickly. Please wait before submitting another entry.";
    // You can redirect the user to a different page or display an error message
    exit;
}

// Process the guestbook entry submission

// Store the current timestamp as the last submission timestamp
$_SESSION['last_submission'] = time();