[wp-hackers] Support for "nofollow"

[Stephen Minutillo]

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.


Steve