swirlee

Well, let’s examine this very group of people you’re talking about. People who don’t know how to manage the technical details of their site? People who don’t care about or know how to solve comment spam? I’d say that 95% of these people are using Blogger, LiveJournal, and SixApart’s TypePad. Those people will be following (no pun intended) the nofollow initiative whether they like it or not. Most of them won’t even notice.

The other 5%? Well, it’s hardly worth mentioning, but it’s comprised of a couple of small groups:

1. People in hosted scenarios where their blog software was installed for them. Most hosting companies which install software for customers are security-conscious and keep such software current, so most of these folks will join the nofollow bandwagon and might not even notice.
2. Folks who installed blog software themselves. Many of these people will upgrade their software sooner or later (especially MT users who are paying for the privilege). Some won’t, but do you suppose they’ll make a dent?
3. People with old, abandoned blogs. Spam comments accumulate on these old sites. Fortunately for us, sites like this have next to no PageRank, so our search results aren’t affected much anyway.

So, which users am I missing?

(Oh, I suppose this will get deleted. Egh. And I felt so good about it.)

Allowing a visitor to put a link on my site is the same as putting a link on myself, is it not? It’s a link from my site, regardless.

Well, now that we have the rel=”nofollow” attribute, that is only the case if you want it to be. I would rather be able to set links that I actively endorse (e.g. in blog posts and in my blogroll) apart from links that everybody else, including spammers, have put on my site.

I’ve read a number of opinions along the lines of “well this is irrelevant if you have a decent anti-spam system installed”. It’s half-right: if every blogger (and forum/guestbook/wiki/etc. administrator) had a decent anti-spam system installed, this would be irrelevant. But the fact is the vast majority don’t, and that means comment spam continues everywhere else, PageRank gets polluted, and my search results get worse. rel=”nofollow” is worth implementing because if the major blog software publishers and services all implement it (and Google says the big ones already are, including Matt) then the entire inscentive behind comment spam disappears.

clintology, I wish I’d seen your plugin earlier before I started (and nearly finished) writing my own. Anyway, good work.

gregorsmith, I can’t imagine any way this could be used for “evil” purposes. The nofollow attribute doesn’t punish the sites linked to or reduce their pagerank; it only prevents their pagerank from being increased by that link.

And NuclearMoose, if you want to increase somebody’s pagerank, link to their site in your blog. It’s good karma, anyway. ??

Edit: clintology: one small bug; it doesn’t appear to work on URLs that have automatically been hyperlinked by WP’s make_clickable() function. I believe adjusting the filter’s priority will fix this.

I’m running 1.5 (nightly from about a week ago) exactly as described and the “Edit” links work fine.

Oops, I just found another issue with the same feature: If you move index.php, you cannot edit it within the WordPress UI (Templates > Main Index), you get “Oops, no such file exists! Double check the name and try again, merci.”