[wp-hackers] OT: "Nofollow" Rant

[Randy Peterman]

Craig Hartel wrote:

>
> It's all about perception; it's about Google et al. wanting to give 
> the illusion
> that they are helping us out. Where was all of this spectacular 
> coordinated
> cooperation months and months ago when we were all crushed under the 
> scourge of
> comment spam? It was in the community, where dedicated coders were 
> hammering
> away writing scripts to help us stop and manage all the crap.
>
It should be noted that Google has offered URL redirecting without page 
rank for some time, the nofollow option is just another way for them to 
do this that is friendly to 6 apart and others.  Sure, it may be PR, it 
may be fruitless, but it is not new.  And as far as comment spammers 
feeling validated by it, I think that they have known it has been a 
valid source of page rank for a long time.  My StatTraq plugin was being 
abused for PageRank by one particular scammer.

 There are nasty people out there and I think that we all know that 
nasty people shouldn't breed.  However, they do, and so they create 
other nasty people and later on you get orcs and other various creatures 
of the night.  That is why I personally prefer to use the Spaminator, 
Spam words and Green Eggs and Spam** plugins.  Part of the mentality of 
the 'Page Rank is god' people is that morals and ethics don't apply 
here.  This sort of internet relativism reminds me of the serpent in the 
Garden of Eden who said, "Did Google really say you shouldn't spam to 
get page rank?"  Soon Eve bit the fruit Adam bought in, too.  Their page 
rank sored but as a consequence labor got intense and Adam had to work 
to get food.

As you can see this is a complex problem and I think that we should call 
on cats A-Z*** to help clean up.  If we can get the cats to work 
together we can help stop the world's spammer, scammers and nasty people 
by uniting and stop linking all together.

I think that CAPTCHA, despite its accessibility issues is a good 
choice.  I also recommend that a 'Song and Dance' plugin be developed 
that requires users to plugin a web cam with special Active-X controls 
that monitors their movement.  If they don't do a song and dance 
(microphones must also be enabled) that matches the one that is in the 
Flash movie, then their comment doesn't post.

Sorry, that's a bit off topic ;)

Sarcastically,

Randy Peterman
Digital Research & Development
www.randypeterman.com
randy at randypeterman.com

** OK, so there's no Green Eggs and Spam plugin.
***Can you tell I have a 2 year old with all of the Dr. Seuss references?