[wp-hackers] OT: "Nofollow" Rant

[Robert Deaton]

I have to agree with a number of other people, for various reasons.
We're not only taking away the pagerank of spammers, we're taking away
the pagerank from everyone. The community as a whole will not see any
major benefit from this, especially since the spam fighting methods we
have now are letting very little if any spam through. If its not
getting through, then leave it as it is, because its obviously
working. Even you yourself Matt said that you removed all plugins and
are relying on the built in methods of spam fighting. Well, let's
continue to rely on this, because with rel="nofollow" we're inviting
the spammers to hit blogs without rel="nofollow" twice as hard to make
up from the loss.

You know, I almost hope that myself and others are wrong, cause
otherwise, we're gonna have a hell of a mess to clean up.


On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 18:09:37 -0800, Matthew Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> wrote:
> Craig Hartel wrote:
> > 1. I agree they aren't using it as publicity. However, their news
> > release, along
> > with the other players, seems to imply that they have come up with
> > something
> > that is on the scale of the next iPod or something.
> 
> It doesn't play music, but it is a crucial first step in a long-term
> solution to spam on WordPress blogs.
> 
> > 2. Google "caused" all this problem when they created the Page Ranking
> > system.
> > It was short-sighted, to say the least. There was criticism of it from
> > the very
> > start, but as Google was a private enterprise, they answered to nobody.
> 
> When PageRank was created few people would have predicted the explosion
> of third party user-generated content on web pages.
> 
> > stopping spam. They are in the business to make money, pure and simple. If
> > bloggers take away a large source of income, maybe we'd have more clout.
> 
> It's not a zero-sum game. They can improve search results (which
> benefits me as a Google user) and disincentize people from exploiting
> the openness of weblog discussions at the same time.
> 
> --
> Matt Mullenweg
>   http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
> http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com
> 
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-- 
--Robert Deaton
http://anothersadsong.com