Re: [drupal-devel] rel=nofollow
On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:08:06 -0500, Andre Molnar <mcsparkerton@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Todd Grimason wrote:
Haven't seen this mentioned anywhere here yet: http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html In short, adding an attribute to an anchor tag: rel="nofollow" will cause participating search engines to not follow/count the link (Google, MSN, and Yahoo! so far). So anywhere there's a link in user-submitted content you'd add this.
Won't stop the spammers - but at least their efforts will be wasted.
I'm not sure that there is much point to this...spam.module is MUCH more effective at making this not a problem. And what if you WANT user submitted content to count towards pagerank? Like, say, people in forums constantly pointing to the same RTFM post. Do spammers spam to raise page rank? Or do spammers spam so that other people see/click on their links? *grumble, grumble, grumble* -- Boris Mann http://www.bryght.com
I'm not sure that there is much point to this...spam.module is MUCH more effective at making this not a problem. And what if you WANT user submitted content to count towards pagerank? Like, say, people in forums constantly pointing to the same RTFM post.
i see a much point. maintaining spam.module is much harder than just rewriting some links. the idea is not to rewrite internal links (such as your forum example), but rather to rewrite external links.
Do spammers spam to raise page rank? Or do spammers spam so that other people see/click on their links?
they most definately spam to raise age rank. they are quite happy to spam paes which are never viewed by humans.
As an experiment this weekend I added a permission to comment.module to allow the user to see anonymous comments. No search engine would ever see a spam link. It would have repercussions to the way discussions work...I'm still thinking about whether I want to actually implement it. On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:20:39 -0500, Moshe Weitzman <weitzman@tejasa.com> wrote:
Do spammers spam to raise page rank? Or do spammers spam so that other people see/click on their links?
they most definately spam to raise age rank. they are quite happy to spam paes which are never viewed by humans.
I'm glad to see this discussion going on after Spread Firefox got hammered this past week and I spent a couple hours manually deleting 50 spam posts from a nefarious user who created multiple accounts after we blocked him/her. However, I think that this new approach could be really damaging to Drupal and its communities, in ways that have already been described. Thus, here's what I propose for this new rel="nofollow" module, borrowing very important thinking from Steven Garrity (http://actsofvolition.com/archives/2005/january/thoughtson) but avoiding his concern that this tool might limit "the wild-westiness™ of weblogs and the ability to benefit from the mass of communication by improving search results." I suggest that we create a new "permissions" role called "spammer". Obviously this would not be a role that anyone would covet. However, it would be easy enough for you, as an admin, to track down an offender (ignoring anonymous comments ATM) and assign them this role. Whereas most permissions role you think of as "granting" permissions, this role would strip you of all power. Not only would you be treated as a blocked user, but all of your posts' links would have the rel="nofollow" tag input filter applied, basically killing any spam links without censoring the posts. As a more extreme measure, we should create a way to mass unpublish spam created by one individual, but in leiu thereof, this approach might be easier to implement (though I have no idea how to do it myself). In any case, I think that we should be very careful about implementing this new tool -- powerful though it may be, for it threatens to weaken wild-westiness™ (as Steven said) of the web while only mildly imposing upon the spammers. Chris
Chris Messina wrote:
In any case, I think that we should be very careful about implementing this new tool -- powerful though it may be, for it threatens to weaken wild-westiness™ (as Steven said) of the web while only mildly imposing upon the spammers.
Or on the user admin page we could add a new feature: 'Delete all posts from this user' which lets you mass-delete nodes/comments from a spammer. This could be implemented as a simple checkbox on the 'Delete user?' confirmation page. We could also leverage the new flood protection mechanism (see contact.module) in both the node and comment modules. -- Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Dries Buytaert wrote:
Chris Messina wrote:
In any case, I think that we should be very careful about implementing this new tool -- powerful though it may be, for it threatens to weaken wild-westiness™ (as Steven said) of the web while only mildly imposing upon the spammers.
Or on the user admin page we could add a new feature: 'Delete all posts from this user' which lets you mass-delete nodes/comments from a spammer.
This could be implemented as a simple checkbox on the 'Delete user?' confirmation page.
We could also leverage the new flood protection mechanism (see contact.module) in both the node and comment modules.
If you or anybody else decides to do that, please do it in a way that can be bypassed. We once had such a feature and it was most annoying for use with mailhandler or similar automatic posting. Cheers, Gerhard
I'm not sure that there is much point to this...spam.module is MUCH more effective at making this not a problem. And what if you WANT user submitted content to count towards pagerank? Like, say, people in forums constantly pointing to the same RTFM post.
i see a much point. maintaining spam.module is much harder than just rewriting some links. the idea is not to rewrite internal links (such as your forum example), but rather to rewrite external links.
For external pages, it is just the same, you might just be happy with increasing some page's pagerank. On some forums, users tend to suggest others going to http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html or the native language translation of that before asking more questions :) Now it would clearly be positive, if these type of pages pagerank would raise :) Goba
participants (7)
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Boris Mann -
Chris Messina -
Dries Buytaert -
Earl Dunovant -
Gabor Hojtsy -
Gerhard Killesreiter -
Moshe Weitzman