[wp-hackers] OT: "Nofollow" Rant

[Robert Deaton]

Terrence, first off, rel="nofollow" from my understanding of what the
google post and what Matt has tried to clarify here, does indeed
follow the links, but does not count the link text towards a pagerank
on google.

Adding a preview button should be in addition to the submit button, as
not everybody wants to preview their comment before submitting, and
adding another button is more work for commenters, something that we
don't particularly want.

Implementing Google's initiative is not threatening the very fabric of
the web in any way, don't you think Google would have taken something
that serious into consideration, its where they're making billions of
dollars. While I do not think that rel="nofollow" is the way to fight
spam, its not going to tear the web to shreds, just hurt some people's
pageranks.

Including plugins in the core is something else that we need to highly
consider before just throwing them in. There are tons of plugins
besides the ones you mentioned that have worked for people, so the
chance of any particular one making it in is rather slim. It is, after
all, the point of plugins, to be installed additionally if someone
needs the features they provide.


On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:32:50 +1300, Terrence Wood <tdw at funkive.com> wrote:
> If implementing rel="nofollow" in the core is the answer to spam, then
> provide an option to let it timeout, because making links invisible to
> search engines is restrictive and goes against everything that the web
> is about, which is the sharing of hyperlinks and distributed publishing.
> 
> What *should* happen is this: 'spam management' gets it's own section
> under 'manage' in the admin area in the default wordpress installation,
> instead of being an optional install via plugins.
> 
> In this 'spam management' section, tools like kittens spaminator, and
> kittens spamwords, should be included (if that's OK with kitten)
> together with an option to disable rel="nofollow" by default or after a
> certain time.
> 
> The comment form should have a preview button, so submitting the form
> requires two clicks, making it difficult for bots.
> 
> It's a case of 'don't make me think' people. If spam is such an issue
> for wordpress blogs, then it needs to be dealt with *properly* out of
> the box, not half-baked. Implementing google's initiative [again, making
> links invisible to search engines threatens the very fabric of the web]
> while real spam prevention measures are optional/additional install is
> half-baked IMO.
> 
> 
> Terrence Wood.
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-- 
--Robert Deaton
http://anothersadsong.com