[theforum] nofollow in articles (was Re: New article)

[Dean Mah]

For clarification, all content is essentially reviewed.  I manually add
'nofollow' to all links.  Historically, here's how it evolved:

1) I started removing links from comments when the comments seemed to be
nothing more than a 'thanks for the article' and a link.

2) Someone complained that their signature was removed from a comment.

3) I realized that profile signatures were added to comments.

4) Oh, hey,  personal information blocks in profiles also have links in
them that aren't scanned by Drupal's code.

5) Hmmm.... now I have to go through each and every comment and profile
and make a value judgment on which links should be removed.  But wait,
if I remove links and personal information, isn't that removing credit
from a user?

6) Post to theforum, they'll know what to do.  Check in IRC to see if
anyone has an immediate solution.

7) David mentions 'nofollow'.  Sounds good.  But where should that be
applied?

8) Slowly start making my way through the comments and profiles and add
'nofollow'.  Wow, this one guy keeps adding links to his stock photo
gallery.  The comments themselves (many revolve around image
manipulation) seem useful but the links just seem link spamming and that
he is trying to 'game' the system

9) Someone complains that evolt.org is selectively enforcing the
'nofollow' attribute.

10) Ah hell, let's just do them all.  A script can do it faster and I
don't have to worry about making a judgment on the content.  Batch it up
and let it go.

11) Because the HTML parser grabs any 'A' tags, we can't just let it run
amok because some example code uses 'A' without being a link to a real
site.  So I manually run a diff script that compares new content on the
site to old content and flags the changes.  If I see any links, I add
the 'nofollow' to them.

Funny incident.  Right after I changed all of the links, a lot of people
manually went in and removed the 'nofollow'.  However, one person was a
little sneakier, he/she changed the attribute to nofo11ow which the
script caught but I would have missed.

So anyway, not sure how that changes your vote, if at all.

Dean


Drew Shiel wrote:

> Therefore, I'm in favour of removing nofollow on any part of the site that
> gets editorial review.
> 
> Abuse of our user profile system, since it's unmoderated, remains a
> possibility, and the options there are either to go to moderation (which
> isn't necessarily a bad idea in any case), or leave it with nofollow
> enabled.
> 
> Drew.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: theforum-bounces at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:theforum-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Dean Mah
> Sent: 17 October 2007 01:48
> To: theforum at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: Re: [theforum] nofollow in articles (was Re: New article)
> 
> Sounds good.  Let's put this baby to a vote on Monday.  Anyone
> interested in making comments has until then to chime in.  So I would
> suggest the questions be:
> 
> 1) Should 'nofollow' be added to links in user profile (signatures and
> personal information blocks)?
> 
> 2) Should 'nofollow' be added to links in comments?
> 
> 3) Should 'nofollow' be added to links in articles?
> 
> Dean