Comments on: rel=”no follow”

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:20:44 +0000

Oooooh! I agree. That kicks lots of ass. It’s not for everyone, certainly, but hey …

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:17:16 +0000

I think Steve has a good solution.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:25:47 +0000

There’s a bunch of ways to do this. I was sitting here, thinking, “Why are we using no-follow for non-owner-generated links? Why do we not tage owner-generated links and give them more weight than the links of the commentors?”

Of course, if people know the rel value, they’ll just spam that, causing you to write some regex to strip that out of your content. I guess it’s easier and faster to parse user-inputted links, add the rel to them, and go on with life.

And you’re right about the spam you’re seeing, Brad, but it’s not all that way: some is chock full of links, and some is random pseudo-philosophical bullshit with a spammer’s desired keyword as the author name and the URL they want to spam as the author URL.

This is a hack. What amuses me is that this little teeny hack took sooooooooo long to get out there. MT has been seeing comment spam in many forms for well over a year.

By: Brad

Brad — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:09:27 +0000

How about a compromise? Links in the actual comment body don’t get the nofollow, but links surrounding the name (like how canspice.org is going to get linked to below this comment where my name is) do get it? The vast majority of spam that I’ve seen (and I haven’t seen much, granted) only has links in the signature portion and not the actual comment text.