[wp-hackers] Support for "nofollow"

[Pete Prodoehl]

Stephen Minutillo wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:38:45 -0700, Craig Hartel <craig at nuclearmoose.com> wrote:
> 
>>There is already a plugin posted on wordpress.org to add the 'rel=nofollow' to
>>URLs. However, in looking at it, I think it also punishes legitimate commenters.
>>I don't want every URL that is posted on my site by a commenter to have the
>>'nofollow' attribute. I want to promote my visitors who post links back to their
>>own sites and to other sites of interest.
>>
>>So, as you develop plugins for this, keep in mind that we don't want to punish
>>our legitimate visitors. Not only that, but it's not of a lot of value anyway if
>>you employ one or more quality spam tools. I don't really need to worry about
>>using this new tool because no spam is getting through anyway.
>>
>>Comments and ideas are most welcome.
> 
>   There's a way to strike a balance that works for well-maintained
> weblogs: only put the rel="nofollow" on new comments!  If the comments
> survive without being deleted a certain (configurable) amount of time,
> they can be assumed to be OK and the rel="nofollow" comes off.  This
> acts as a fail-safe: if a comment gets through the spam blocking and
> is posted to the site, the spammer still doesn't get any
> PageRank-juice out of it, because a human will come around and delete
> it before the timer expires.  The brand new comments are sort of
> considered to be on probation for a while.
> 
> This is what I plan to do on my site.  Right now I am just rewriting
> all links in comments (and the author link) to have ref="nofollow",
> but that unfairly penalizes legitimate commenters.  Spam on my site
> never survives for more than 24 hours, so I'll probably set up a
> timeout of about a week.
> 
> BTW, I see that Matt's name is on the announcement from Google, so I'm
> assuming this is going in 1.5, and will be turned on by default?  If
> so, you might want to consider this "probation" idea.  I'd think that
> by default the probation period would be infinite, since there are
> plenty of people who set up weblogs and then quickly lose interest and
> leave them to rot.  But for people who maintain them carefully, an
> advanced setting to drop the nofollow from "tenured" comments would be
> a nice refinement.

Definitely good ideas Stephen! I was worried because so many people has 
these knee-jerk reactions about how this was a bad thing, but I think if 
we come up with the best combination of existing measures against 
comment spam, and couple them with the nofollow thing, we'll have 
something good. I too first thought that I'd prefer for all comments to 
go live immediately with nofollow, and I could then moderate as needed 
later allowing legit comments to have the nofollow removed. This would 
keep the conversation going without dishing out immediate PageRank 
juice. Whitelisting is a good idea as well, but would you want to allow 
it based off of the url of the commenter (which might allow spammers to 
spoof who the say they are) or would you apply it to the urls in the 
comments?

Keep the ideas going!

Pete