[wp-hackers] Support for "nofollow"

[Stephen Minutillo]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:35:54 -0600, Pete Prodoehl
<pete.prodoehl at cygnusinteractive.com> wrote:
> 
> 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!

Well for me, I don't think I'd want a whitelist just for nofollow.  I
see nofollow only as a fail-safe.  You have all these spam prevention
measures, whatever they are, maybe keyword scanning, bayesian
analysis, a whitelist if that's what you like, registered commenters,
looking for suspiciously encoded characters, too many links, too many
comments in a short period of time, etc. etc.  But still, some comment
spam is going to get through.  rel="nofollow" on brand new comments is
going to make sure that when spammers do figure out how to get around
your countermeasures (and they will, eventually), they STILL get no
benefit.

It seems that WP 1.5 has some new, very effective spam countermeasures
already.  It's going to take spammers a while to figure them out and
rewrite their tools to get around them.  If it's very well known that
1.5 also makes use of nofollow, there's a chance that the spammers
won't even bother retooling to attack it, and move on to some other
target.  At least, that's my naive hope.


Steve