[Catalyst] Wiki spam

A. Pagaltzis pagaltzis at gmx.de
Sat Apr 8 00:34:24 CEST 2006


* Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> [2006-04-07 18:15]:
> You can prevent the spammers from winning by making sure all
> external links are marked with the rel="nofollow" attribute.
> This will hopefully also prevent them from spamming in the
> future.

No, it won’t. I’ve not seen a single site that was spared by
spammers because of `nofollow`. All `nofollow` has done is to
break the web of legitimate links because people employ it
blindly.

* Brandon Black <blblack at gmail.com> [2006-04-07 23:35]:
> I also don't think the rel="nofollow" thing is a good idea for
> wiki edits.  It works pretty well for blog comments and forum
> postings and whatnot, as it serves as a distinction between the
> links the site administrators put in place, which have
> significance, and the crap the users post, which might be
> irrelevant or spam.

I find that it’s the other way around. If someone takes the time
to comment on my weblog, the least I can do is offer the courtesy
of sharing a little of my Google juice. Of course, this does
require that the weblog owner read every single comment posted;
if they can’t be bothered to watch their blog this closely, then
applying `nofollow` across the board does indeed prevent too much
damage from happening.

OTOH I find `nofollow` somewhat useful on wikis, where it can be
used to quarantine links for a particular amount of time before
they are promoted to first-class citizens.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>



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